


APOLLO

by albrechts



Category: ATEEZ (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Ballet, M/M, he/they yeosang, san has ADHD, there are a lot of character arcs, this got extremely out of hand
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-27
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:54:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 71,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27226894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/albrechts/pseuds/albrechts
Summary: San has always felt something for Albrecht, and always found it so easy to sink into that role. The prescribed force of external control, the half-dream sensation of being puppeteered. A marionette on strings jumping, jumping, jumping, jumping - and then, once those strings are cut, all that is left of him collapses to the ground. Breaths heavy, barely clinging to life.And still, given the strength to stand, he will dance again.
Relationships: Choi San/Jung Wooyoung, Kim Hongjoong/Park Seonghwa
Comments: 107
Kudos: 113





	1. margeurite

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Val_is_Valid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Val_is_Valid/gifts).



> over a month ago i was inspired by a ballet dancer/skater boy prompt to start this and...well i didn't plan on it taking a month to write, but i also didnt plan on it being over 20k words. as of posting the first chapter the whole doc is...checks notes....30k long, and still with a ways to go. so, uh. have fun lmao

Seoul is cold, and the busses are always full. 

Those were the first things San noticed when he’d moved, and the things which he’d continued to notice over the years that followed. Seoul is cold and everything has this strange claustrophobia of being too close and, oxymoronically, such an ineffable distance away. The other side of the city could be the other side of the world, and Namhae is another planet altogether for all that it’s only three hours away. 

He’s become a silent contortionist in this place, twisting and folding himself to fit, and always there is a chill in his fingertips that hasn’t left since he left the warm south. 

The busses are always full, and even when they’re not the claustrophobia of this city makes him regret the thought of sharing a stranger’s seat. So he stands, more often than not, a weary hand dripping from the bus hoop and a gym bag slumped across his shoulder, and on the nights he goes home late he will let his eyes fall closed, Liszt a heartstring of melancholy in his earphones, and allows the gentle motion of the bus to sway him back and forth. 

Apollo are the terms in which he thinks of Stravinsky, and Massenet is the sound of Manon. A well-earned weariness in tired legs which still crave to turn out despite the hours upon hours he has worked them all day. It is instinct, he thinks, absently balancing his toes against the floor and pushing against the arch of his sneaker until it bends, curves, stretches his foot until it aches like masochistic satisfaction. It is a prehistoric instinct and perhaps a little bit of madness that drives people to dance. 

It is red shoes that move without rest - and for what would he want to rest when there is still music to burn in his blood and a stage whose vinyl has been worn down by the press of a thousand feet?

He is thinking of that stage, absentminded in his body’s bid for sleep as the bus sways him gently where he stands. He’s thinking of the stage, and the upcoming gala. He’s thinking of the velvet-darkness hush of a theatre in the moments before the conductor raises their hands; he’s thinking of the rush of his heart climbing up his throat to the mournful call of the first violin. 

He’s thinking of two months from now, when he’ll be on that stage again, and the still air will be hot in his lungs and an audience will watch him in silence from the dark, the blinding lights only catching on a rare diamond ring or the catlike glint of eyes tracking him across the stage. Watching him write his instinct, his madness, into a palette of art. 

He’s thinking of the stage, and how it’s the only place in this wide city where he doesn’t feel the press of claustrophobia. 

He’s thinking of that when someone bumps him, firm enough to make him stumble, and then a moment before San can catch himself a hand curls around his bicep and his bag slips down his arm and his eyes snap open, and the first thing he sees is _red._

A wash of red satin so sudden that it makes him blink once, twice, before he realises that there’s a hand holding his arm and the person who is wearing that red satin jacket is speaking to him. 

“Are you okay?” washes through the strains of Vivaldi and San fumbles to pull out an earphone, startled awake but still more than half asleep. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to,” the voice shoots through him clearly now, pitched high with concern.

“I’m fine,” San manages to say, shaken and bleary torn from his meditative daze. All he can process in that moment is the red satin jacket filling his vision, his attention narrowed to the firm hand clasping his arm. Short black-painted nails, a tangle of tattoos that ensnare San’s gaze. “I’m fine,” he says again, reading _THANX_ written bold across the knuckles of that hand, something indecipherable inked along the side of his middle finger, the startlingly detailed head of a snake poking out from the cuff of his jacket to rest upon the back of his hand. “I’m… what happened?”

“I fell into you,” is the sheepish reply and San forces his bleary eyes to travel away from the tattoos and up, up the red-clothed arm holding his to find the face of the man who had crashed into him. 

Wide eyes, a pretty face, the graceful slope of a nose; a freckle gracing the pout of his lower lip. Something recklessly charismatic about the beanie pulled over his hair, the oxymoronic delicacy of the chains looped through a number of ear piercings that San doesn’t even try to count. 

“Oh,” is all San can say, blinking the daze of exhaustion from his eyes.

“Were you,” the man pauses, hesitates, his hold on San’s arm fluttering tight and then soft. “Were you sleeping?” he asks, the question tilting his head. The earrings tilt with him, sway hypnotically with the motion. “Standing up?”

San blinks again, glances around them. The bus is about as empty as Seoul transit ever gets; there are a few seats now which are clear and no one is looking at the commotion they’ve caused. “I wasn’t,” San says, more instinct than anything, and is undermined by the way his voice is rough with rest and disuse, his eyes still blinking owlishly. 

A quiet laugh slips past those lips, light and unruly in all its hapless grace before it’s stifled, leaving San reeling, leaving him thinking of Minkus and temple dancers and the sweet chime of bells tied around ankles and wrists. He feels opiate and forlorn and something in him tilts him towards this stranger, and he might have stumbled if not for the hand at his arm. 

“Come sit down,” the man ushers him towards a seat, and San is helpless but to follow his command, pulled in to follow when this stranger like a dream takes a seat against the window. “Where are you headed?”

“BongCheon-Dong,” San finds himself answering, whether it’s instinct or madness the way this man’s questions drive him to speak the same way music drives him to dance. A siren call. A Wilis singing for him to dance and dance and drown. 

He must be more tired than he’d thought. 

The man nods, hums, raps black-polished fingernails across the window sill. “Still a way to go. I’ll make it up to you,” he says and turns a blinding smile towards San. “You go back to sleep, or doze off or whatever, and I’ll wake you up before your stop. Sound good?”

San looks at him and wonders if this man is a Giselle, or a Nikiya, or Manon. If he will entice San to come closer and closer still, and lead him to tragedy. 

He wonders why there aren’t so many stories with happy endings.

Like eyes adjusting steadily to the night sky, he notices another freckle beneath his eye and wonders if the longer he stares, the more will appear. 

“You don’t owe me anything.”

That pout is back, a whine caught in his voice. “I’ll feel bad if I don’t apologise somehow. I’m going past there anyway,” he says, sitting back in the seat, arms folded over his chest, “so it’s no trouble for me.” A shy glance cast from the corner of his eye - his iris is dark brown and pretty, San notices through the haze of his confusion, washed with a bright shine from the white light of the bus. “Unless you’re uncomfortable,” he acquiesces like it’s another apology. “If you are, I’ll leave you alone.”

“I’m not,” San admits, unable to hold that gaze and he instead bundles his bag onto his lap and closes his eyes, admittedly too tired to really question the absurdity of all this. “I just don’t really see the point.”

“Well, how about this,” the red-dressed man considers. “If I bumped you and said nothing then you’d have a bad impression of me, even if we never meet again in our lives. It won’t seem like much, and you might even have forgotten me by tomorrow. But if you ever saw me again, or even someone like me, you might think, _Ah, that asshole,_ and get angry. I might never know that you resent me for that, but I think in a way it all comes back around.”

This pulls half a laugh out of San. He doesn’t open his eyes, but nor does he bother to hide his smile at the incongruity of it all.

“But if I apologise,” the man continues, “and offer to do something nice, then even if we don’t end up friends at least we’ll part on good terms. That way, even if you never see me again then you still might think sometimes, _Ah, that stranger. He was a little bit weird, but at least he was cute.”_

“Cute?” San arches a brow without opening his eyes.

“Aren’t I, though? I’m quite cute,” he retorts, and there is that shadow of his charming laugh colouring his words - enough to make San squint open an eye to see where he’s cupping his face in his tattooed hands, his smile beaming at San as though it’s the sun shattering across ocean waves. A snake stares at San from the back of one hand; a single, wide open eye from the other.

There is something so warm about that smile, so reckless and free, and for a moment San almost tastes the salt of a sea breeze on his lips. For a moment the chill of Seoul which has never quite left his bones is forgotten. Beneath three gazes that seem to stare right through him, he feels _warm._

“Modesty is more attractive,” he lies, but the answering smile hasn’t quite left his lips. 

“Modesty,” the man scoffs, waving a hand through the air as though to deny the whole idea. “I spent so many years being modest, and for what? Let me ask you,” he says, “seriously. What are you passionate about?”

San blinks at him, lazy and heavy-eyed in a weary, almost fond sort of amusement. “Passion?” he echoes, quite taken with the way the lights catch in this man’s dark eyes. 

He nods, the teeth of his grin catching on his freckled lower lip, and he looks for all the world as though he is a bottle of champagne shaken and set to explode. So much life bundled beneath his skin and no part of him holds the dignified frailty of a Giselle. More than that, he is Lescaut; he is a Golden Idol; he is exuberance and enthusiasm and a life so bold that it makes something clench and set alight in the pit of San’s stomach.

They have always been the characters San has loved the most.

Instinct, he wonders, or madness. 

“Dance,” he admits, his head leaned back against the seat, eyes still trained on the firework flare of this stranger’s exuberance. “I’ve been working all day on choreography,” he admits, and isn’t quite sure why he does, “and I’m so tired I can barely stand. But I still want to keep going. I don’t want to stop. Even if I dance every day until I can’t feel my legs, tomorrow always seems such a long time to wait before I can start again.”

“Is that your passion?” the man in red asks.

San breathes deeply, lets his eyes fall closed, a small smile sitting on his lips. “You remind me of someone I met once,” he says rather than answer. A small hum as a question, and San admits, “I don’t know him at all, but every now and then I think, _Ah, that stranger. He was a bit weird, but he had some bright ideas._ I didn’t know what I was doing,” he sighs, “or where I was going. I was just sitting there, wondering if I should bother doing what I wanted even if it meant struggling all my life, or if I should just sit back and go where things take me.”

It feels strange - almost dreamlike, how this half-forgotten encounter floats to the top of his wearied mind. He can remember only the most vivid of details; the sand scattered across the weather-beaten pier, barnacles clinging to the waterlogged wood, wind-tossed hair dyed a bright cherry red. Maybe it will be something common for him, he thinks with half a laugh. Strange strangers and the colour red. 

_“It doesn’t matter what you dream for,”_ he recites the words which have stuck with him for so long, carried him so far, embedded themselves so deeply within him that he’d all but forgotten they were there, _“We’re all at the starting point of this long journey, so you should ask yourself: what is your treasure? And once you know, then decide if you will join us.”_

“Did you find it?” this stranger asks. 

San breathes a quiet laugh, absentmindedly shakes his head. “Not yet,” he says without opening his eyes, imagining for a moment that the cool air conditioning is instead the warm winds of Namhae. “But I’m looking.”

He dozes into the stranger’s considering hum, drifting vaguely to the thought that the subdued rush of traffic sounds almost like the crash of distant waves. He misses home, he knows. He misses the sea. But even if one day he returns, he knows it’ll only be to find the things he left behind. His heart might still be in Namhae, and homesickness might ebb and flow through him like the tide, but he’s looking for something.

Something to live for.

Something he can’t live without.

Even when it feels so distantly out of reach, he knows that if he’d never left the shores of his hometown then he might never have gone looking at all.

“I’m impressed,” the stranger says, murmurs at the edge of San’s dreams. “A lot of people wouldn’t even have tried.”

He isn’t sure exactly when or how he falls asleep, but it feels as though both seconds and hours have passed before someone is nudging his shoulder and stirring him awake.

“Open your eyes, treasure,” a voice murmurs by his ear, amusement chiming like bells tied round a temple dancer’s ankle. “Is this your stop?”

Reluctant to leave his sleep, San lifts his head from where he’s slumped to cushion it, snaps upright when he realises he’d been leaning on that red-satin shoulder. “Oh my god,” he mumbles, bleary, quickly patting at his cheek to make sure he hadn’t drooled all over this man. “I actually fell asleep.”

“You actually did,” he agrees, his laughter crisp and clear and sweet. “You better go, before you miss your stop,” he quickly ushers San out of the seat they’d shared. “Go go go, and get a proper night’s rest!”

A quick glance to the night outside finds the bus stopped at San’s station, the driver eyeing him with veiled impatience in the rearview mirror, and San rushes to sling his bag over his shoulder, lurches down the aisle with legs turned weak from half a day spent on jeté. 

Too much of a mess in this half-awakened state, San doesn’t figure he has time to glance behind him. Tangled and ensnared still by his sleep, an Orphic fear trembles in him, tells him not to look back. Tells him that maybe the man in red is still there, sitting forward with his arms folded over the seat in front, his chin propped up and a teasing smile on his face - that maybe he really, truly is there and that San hadn’t imagined falling asleep on his shoulder. 

Maybe he is there, and maybe it isn’t a dream, but some ancient, mythic certainty tells him that he shouldn’t look back. That if he doubts enough to steal a glance then all he has of that dream, all he was given by that stranger might slip away, disappear, vanish into the haze of illusion. 

He can’t bring himself to turn around, but a laugh follows him and a voice calls out all the same. “Keep looking,” is all that this dream of his says. “You’ll find it soon enough.”

It’s only once he’s disembarked and the bus has pulled away, taking that oddly transitive world with it, that San regrets he hadn’t looked back - that he regrets he never made time to ask the man’s name. He isn’t sure, exactly, what he’d have done with it. 

He thinks he might simply have liked to say it, just once. 

_Ah, that stranger._ That’s all he’s left with now, the dreamed-up warmth of Namhae leaving him to the chill of Seoul’s night; a snake, an open eye and a bright smile piercing through him. _He was a little bit weird, but at least he was cute._

Eurydice, San thinks, and the satin-soft absurdity of it makes him laugh. Shaking his head, he hikes his bag higher on his shoulder, pulls his jacket closer around him and sets off to walk the quiet night streets towards home. 

Home, insofar as he could find one in a place like Seoul. 

Home, as much as it is made so by the people he finds there.

Consider: a boy running away, a man running home, and someone much like the ocean to which all rivers seem to lead. 

There is San who fled to Seoul in search of something he doesn’t know how to define; there is Seonghwa who trained in Vaganova, who danced in Bolshoi, who returned because as large as the world is and as easily as he could have taken it he is still nothing more or less than human - and there is something so infinitely human about being offered anything, everything, and realising that all he wants is everything he left behind. 

And there is Yunho, who would seem so incongruous to be part of their distant lives if not for the way the stars gravitate around him, the world spins on his axis, and the heart of this city seems to beat at the same tempo as his. He is everything of Seoul that is neither coldness nor claustrophobia; he is reliability, he is tirelessness, he is a buttoned-up shirt in the morning and he is coming alive at night. He is comfort and a promise and if it weren’t for him, if it weren’t for Seonghwa, then San thinks he might have given up a long time ago. 

“Hwa?” he calls out into the warmth of the apartment, relaxing into the familiar absence of silence that welcomes him back. 

“Kitchen!” Seonghwa calls back in answer, the warm breeze of his voice falling patiently over the sound of whatever music he’s got playing - something pleasant and poppy and rather unlike Seonghwa’s taste that sets an oxymoron of comfort and a relaxed kind of excitement, paired sweetly with the savoury scent of something cooking. 

His exhaustion settling into something closer to warm weariness, San follows his voice, catches the hiss and scrape of Seonghwa stirring a hot pan and finds him with his back to the door, an apron folded around his waist and the sleeves of his shirt pushed up to his elbows. His hair is still damp from the shower and deeper in the house San can hear the pipes working and Yunho’s voice singing indistinguishably from the bathroom. 

“What’cha making?” he asks, hooking his chin over Seonghwa’s shoulder to peer down at the stove, arms winding in a natural, comfortable slump around Seonghwa’s waist.

“Just fried rice,” Seonghwa hums, not disturbing San’s perch when he reaches for a separate pan to scrape a generous helping of bacon into the frankly quite enormous pile of food. “We’ll freeze the rest for lunch.”

“Mmm,” San hums a sleepy agreement, nodding his head heavily against Seonghwa’s shoulder. “Want me to help?”

“Nearly done,” Seonghwa answers, letting San off easy. “Get some plates for me?”

San gives him another vague hum and reluctantly steps away. “What song is this?” he asks absently, crouching down by the cupboard and pulling out three plates one by one to cradle atop his knees.

Seonghwa only says, “It’s good, huh?” which isn’t exactly an answer, but San isn’t particularly bothered. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

“It’s auditions for Albrecht,” he answers easily and without hesitation. “How come?”

“I won’t be home for dinner,” Seonghwa explains, and the way he’s studiously focused on cooking is beginning to feel a little more intentional of him avoiding San’s eyes. Interesting. “Yunho’s having a thing,” he vagues. “New semester, he wants to celebrate after the first week of classes so he’s asked some friends to join.”

San folds his arms across his knees, looks up to arch a brow at Seonghwa. “Just say you have a date.”

“With Yunho?” Seonghwa offers a light laugh, still giving the stove more attention than it strictly needs.

“With his producer friend you’re in love with,” San corrects, dropping his chin to rest on the heel of his palm, smiling up at Seonghwa with narrow, teasing eyes. “He’ll be there, right?”

Seonghwa purses his lips before purposely smoothing out his expression, a futile attempt to quell San’s amusement in the scathing side-eyed glance he shoots down at him. “I guess.”

“If it’s not a date then where’s my invitation?” San prods, standing up to set the plates on the bench while Seonghwa scoops a small spoon of rice and offers it to him to taste to an emphatic hum of approval.

“Currently?” Seonghwa asks, pretending so hard that his ears haven’t gone pink. “Singing OST in the shower. They’ll start at nine,” he informs entirely too readily - although Seonghwa is just that particular sort of person who knows the details of everything and plans it all in advance. He more than anyone San has ever met truly has it all figured out. Meticulous in the way he lives, the way he works, the way he moves. "Yunho wants us to bring something to eat, and maybe drinks."

"Dinner after nine? Drinks so close to performance season?" San teases. "That's not like you. Just how much do you like him?"

Seonghwa’s dark glance has only ever been enough to make San laugh. This is home, insofar as Seoul has ever been one, and dreams of tattooed hands and words that sound like the hush of waves against sand have fallen far from San’s weary mind. 

* * *

That night San dreams of red shoes and a red dress, of cherry hair and the shoulder of a satin jacket cool and silken against his cheek. He dreams of a hand gripping his arm and the snake that rests upon that hand uncoils itself from ink and skin and winds around him but he is not afraid because he is not Nikia; he is not Cleopatra; he is not Philautia. The snake curls around and around and an unblinking eye watches, looks at him and right through him, so aggressively passive that the stare even more than the serpent is what intimidates him. 

He wakes in the silent moments before his alarm to a bed that feels strangely empty, a heartfelt ache he can’t describe in his chest and the name Marguerite blooming sweet as scarlet flowers on his tongue. 

He lies there, dazed, the watery light of a pre-dawn morning filtering in through his window and wonders if he’s been working too hard. If he’s been dancing too much. If he’s been so busy chasing after the illusion of this passion that he’s forgotten that he came here in search of something else altogether. 

The ceiling he stares at is plain white in the same manner as tulle; dimpled and carved with the texture of paint. A rabbit in a snowstorm. He thinks of the layers upon layers of fine gauze that make a Romantic skirt, the barely-there glimpse of white-stockinged legs beneath the white and white and white. He thinks of a kingdom of shades, a court of Wilis; of the siren call of pallor-faced ghosts telling him to dance and dance and dance until he dies. 

He doesn’t think it would be a particularly miserable end for someone like him, but then he thinks of Albrecht and of having something to live for. 

He thinks of a red flower sitting atop a grave. 

_Let me ask you,_ a Lescaut entices him. _What is your treasure?_

San doesn’t expect to see Yunho when he gets up. He doesn’t think anyone really expects to see Yunho at any hour of the morning, truth be told. But there he is, slumped at the table, looking for all the world as though he’s fallen asleep with his head resting in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. 

San gives him a long glance and, when he doesn’t move, briefly arches both his brows in vague acceptance and walks around where he’s half-seated at the table to find the still-steaming kettle and two mugs. In the time it takes San to pour a coffee for Seonghwa and himself, peel an orange and pop the first segment into his mouth Yunho hasn’t moved and, indeed, his breaths have deepened into something almost like snores. 

Seonghwa emerges from his room, dressed and ready and perfect, and pauses briefly in the doorway to glance at Yunho. 

San can only shrug at him, and Seonghwa shrugs back, each of them equally without answer, before he circles the bench to take up his coffee and stand by San’s side, wordlessly accepting the half of the orange that San breaks off for him, both of them with their attention trained keenly on Yunho. 

He reserves a seed of the orange beneath his tongue and debates his chances of spitting it to bounce off Yunho’s slack cheek. But Seonghwa, ever with an uncanny instinct regarding San and his proclivity for mischief, pins him with an unamused glance from the corner of his eye. San can only tut quietly and spit the seed into a cup of the orange’s discarded peel, his fun effectively ruined before it had a chance to begin. 

They all startle to the sound of Yunho’s phone bursting to life, vibrating in an earnest bid to topple off the table. San drops the mouthful of coffee he’d just taken back into his cup before he can choke on it and Yunho’s head falls off his fist as he startles awake. 

Seonghwa, elegant even in this, only jolts quietly, makes a soft sound of surprise in the back of his throat - and then has the grace to dart an artfully disgusted glance between San’s face and his mug, and back up to his face. 

“Woo?” Yunho mumbles into his phone, dazed, instinctively lifting the coffee in his hand to his lips, soon followed by a sullen, “No,” that tells San that Yunho has been caught sleeping. “Now?” he seems to repeat, a touch of urgency colouring his voice as he half-stands, immediately throwing back the rest of his coffee like water and dipping to sling a bag over his shoulder and tuck his battered old skateboard under his arm. “No, don’t bother coming up,” he says, for the first time sounding truly awake, “I’ll be down in a bit- Oh,” he cuts himself off, glances over the island counter just as he turns to make for the door, the phone angled slightly away from his face. “Sannie,” he says, stopping in his tracks and clearly pressed for time, “tonight, we-”

“Hyung told me,” San kindly cuts him off, waving him towards the door. “I’ll be there.”

Fervent, Yunho mouths _Thank you_ over the receiver, eyes flicking fervent appreciation between San and Seonghwa, and continues his rush to the door. “Stop _whining,”_ he says into the phone, wrenching open the door and waving quickly to the two of them as he goes. “I’m coming, I’m coming, I’m on my way right now-”

Anything else he says is cut off by the punctuant snap of the door closing behind him, and the house is left once more in a pleasant silence. San makes to bring his coffee to his lips and is stopped by Seonghwa’s hand covering the mouth of his cup. 

“Don’t,” he says, somewhere between a warning and a plea. “Make a new one.”

San shrugs away and drinks from the cup all the same, a smirk teasing his lips at the expression of pained distress that flickers across Seonghwa’s face. “Who’s Woo?” he asks instead, biting into another segment of the orange. 

“Have you not met _any_ of Yunho’s friends?” Seonghwa returns, picking up the pile of discarded peel and depositing it in the bin. 

“I see Yeosang every day,” San tries to defend himself, arms folded across his chest. 

“They’re your coworker,” Seonghwa counters, dry, delicately brushing his hands off. 

“Mingi comes around now and then,” San insists and then pauses, searching for another name. “I met Jongho.”

“Once,” Seonghwa all but rolls his eyes. “And don’t pretend you don’t hide in your room whenever Mingi’s here.”

“He’s quiet!” he says. “Scary. I don’t think he likes me.”

“Song Mingi is the size and shape of an overfriendly rottweiler,” Seonghwa says. “Neither quiet nor scary, and practically incapable of disliking anyone.”

San pouts at him. “Who’s Woo?” he pointedly draws back to the original question. Maybe he _liked_ keeping his circle of acquaintances small. Maybe he wasn’t used to knowing people who knew so many people, and all the other people who those people knew. 

Maybe he’d left home lonely, and the feeling had never quite abated.

Seonghwa tuts, but answers all the same, “Wooyoung dances with Yun. You’ll meet him tonight,” he reasons, and then seems as though he’s going to say more before stopping himself almost sharply. His lips purse briefly, and he glances away. In profile he is undeniably beautiful, and his expression of tense conflict is an art in itself. “You can ask Yeosang about it,” he says, and there is that familiar ache of guilt-regret-guilt-pain- _guilt_ that flicks across his face, fleeting and so potent, whenever he’s forced to hold that name on his tongue and let it fall past his lips. 

San knows better than to say anything about it. He almost asks if Yeosang will be there before biting his tongue. Some questions, as harmless as they might seem, are truly best to ask of other people. 

So San keeps silent and finishes his coffee. He falls into a familiar bathroom relay with Seonghwa as they wash their faces and brush their teeth between packing their bags with clean clothes and fresh lunch, stretch to loosen cold muscles, map their bodies for any strains they shouldn’t aggravate. 

It is silent with Yeosang’s name still hanging heavy in the air between them, but not uncomfortable. Silence as gentle patience; a quiet reassurance. The beat of their friendship is so often counted in the measured tap of silk-bound shoes against a vinyl stage in the momentary absence of sound. That to land heavily like this might by technicality be wrong, but all these minutiae of mistakes serve to remind them each of their humanity. 

Seonghwa, as shining and princely as he is onstage beneath the blinding heat of the lights, is still the man who trembles so deeply after a performance that he might shake apart if there is no-one there to hold him. For all his precision and perfection he is still someone who feels keenly the sharp blade of a trailing stare, and still bleeds for the helpless inevitability of hurting those he cares for. 

As much as Seonghwa is someone who cannot help but be loved through no fault of his own, San is a constant. A reassurance. An audience who hears these heavy footfalls, who sees the momentary bend in Seonghwa’s steel line, and is convinced that these weaknesses are what make him seem real more than any polished veneer of perfection. 

Like an audience in awe, he will be silent until Seonghwa’s curtain is drawn and in the hush of that darkness, when he trembles and shakes and curses every wrong step he made, San will hold him together, keep him from breaking apart, and wonder how someone like Seonghwa can’t see his own magnificence. 

These sorts of things, though… even if they can be put into words, there’s no true way to make someone believe them. 

So San keeps Seonghwa silent company on their commute, lets him have the hour of their morning class to recentre himself and breathe, to pull himself from the wings and return to the stage. 

He supposes it doesn’t help to have Yeosang as their pianist, but there they were; Seonghwa as a principal dancer, Yeosang as the orchestra’s first violin, and San tangled up in the mess that had been made of the friendship between his two closest friends. 

It isn’t that Seonghwa has ever begrudged San his fondness for Yeosang, or even as though he has ever made San feel as though there is some wretched sort of choice before him - who to chase after, who to leave behind. But it can only ever be San and Seonghwa, or San and Yeosang. Yeosang is too sharp, too brittle and biting to bear being near him with only the thin buffer of San, and Seonghwa is too soft, too kind, too sorry to want to make Yeosang suffer his company. 

It’s only when the instructor calls the steps of allegro and counts them in to Yeosang’s playing that San is pulled from the complex tangle of what all this is, the limbo the three of them have settled into over the past few months. He recognises the melody Yeosang plays in an instant and has to physically restrain himself from whipping his head around to look at them - instead keeping his eyes locked on his own incredulous expression in the mirror. 

He doesn’t need to see to know Yeosang will meet his glance with the slightest curl of a taunting smile, the subtle arch of a brow daring San to do anything about it. 

San can’t do _anything_ about it, they both know, but wait for class to come to a close - all the while with Yeosang colouring the ambiguity of his setlist with that dreaded melody. 

The rest of the class is not immune to it, San catching glances of a conflicted grimace flitting across even Seonghwa’s face whenever he hears a familiar phrase in the music.

“Yeosang,” San demands the moment they are freed from the constraints of performance, the corps bowing _en reverence_ to their instructor and, grudgingly, to their pianist. “Did you just spend half an hour _Angel of Music-_ ing me?”

Yeosang jerks his chin in a sharp, instinctive movement that flicks the fall of hair away from their eyes, looks up at San with that tauntingly familiar expression of bland pleasantry, an untrustworthy sort of amusement hidden somewhere in the way those eyes narrow like silent laughter at San’s expense. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

San’s expression scrunches subtly, at a loss for what to say but still determinedly not looking away from Yeosang’s beguiling little smile. “Thirty minutes,” he repeats.

“What do you have against Phantom, Sannie?” they mock, lowering the lid of the piano so they can rest their elbow upon the black-polished wood, plant their sharp chin in their hand and blink up at San with all the innocence of someone who has committed many crimes in their short life. “You seemed upset. I wanted to cheer you up.”

Quite suddenly even the affected irritation that San had armoured himself with evaporates in the face of his perceptive consideration, and the teasing, almost mocking way that Yeosang thought to distract him from his distractions. The performative set of his shoulders loosens and he bows his head a little, lips pursing while he battles with how to be sincere in how he thanks Yeosang for his concern.

“If you say something gross,” Yeosang speaks over his mulling, “I’m going to wait for your mullet to grow long enough and then I am going to strangle you with it.”

San meets their eyes, lips pressed into an unimpressed line. “I was just going to say thank you.”

Yeosang squares him with a look from the corner of their red-marked eye and warns, “I suggest you cut your hair,” before pushing up to stand.

“Sangie!” San trots to follow after their scathing retreat, a wordless and inarticulate fondness for Yeosang’s barbed-wire affections and keen-eyed care blooming warm in his chest. “Are you coming to Yunho’s thing tonight?”

“Of course,” he says, something about the perfectly nonchalant way they say it prickling an instinct of caution at the back of San’s neck. “Hongjoong threatened to be disappointed but understanding if I don’t turn up.”

“I didn’t know you could be threatened,” San admits with perfect honesty. “Who’s Hongjoong?”

Yeosang almost glances at him, not quite meeting San’s eyes when they say, “Yunho’s producer friend,” before averting their attention back towards the door.

Oh.

“Oh,” San says before he can quite stop himself. “Hey if you don’t want to go,” he allows, “it’s not like I know anyone else. I’d honestly probably prefer getting drunk and watching 1995 Phantom, and that says a lot.” It isn’t even really a lie.

“Sannie,” Yeosang rounds on him properly this time, meets his eyes with all the force of their quiet intensity, “you haven’t met Hongjoong, so I don’t think you’d understand even if I explained it to you, but the last thing on this earth that anyone would knowingly do is upset him.”

San gives that a considering pout, thinks about it for a moment. “Is he that scary?”

Yeosang is silent for a long stretch of seconds, and seems to be genuinely thinking about it. Eventually he settles to say, “I don’t know how to answer that question so I’m just gonna say yes, but also no, but also because of that no it’s a very strong yes too. Does that clear things up?”

San glances at the ceiling for a moment. “No.”

“Just come,” Yeosang sighs, already turning away once more, “and when you meet him you’ll know within like five minutes what I mean.”

“So no Phantom?” San calls after them.

“I think I’ve punished you with enough Phantom for one day,” they wave over their shoulder without turning around. “I’ll see you at auditions.”

And that’s that. Yeosang is gone, disappearing down the twisting halls of the studio, and San realises only ten minutes after they’re gone, once he’d stretched himself out by the mirrors in a split and scrolled through his phone to find the section of Adam’s _Giselle_ that he’ll be performing that he’d forgotten to ask them about Wooyoung. 

It truly hadn’t crossed his mind, and slips away easily even now. He has other things to focus on. More immediate things than the vapid curiosity of a friend of Yunho’s which by rights San has likely been all but avoiding up until now. He looks at the timestamp of his phone, rolls up out of his splits and bounces lightly to his feet. Months of rehearsal, all for today. All for two hours from now; for twelve o’clock; for the audition that might take him from soloist to principal. 

He straps his phone into his armband, positions himself at the far corner of the room and breathes the tension and distractions out from the pit of his stomach to leave him effortlessly light, perfectly grounded as the call of low horns fills his ears, announces his entrance as Albrecht. 

It’s uncanny, he’s been told more than once by an impressed Seonghwa and a vaguely disturbed Yeosang, the way he sinks into a role. The way he loses himself to arrangement and choreography. Truly loses himself, he remembers Seonghwa emphasising. He’d put it that way once, to soothe Yeosang’s discomfort. Borrowed Seonghwa’s way with words to explain that it’s as though everything that is Choi San disappears beneath the surface of a lake, impossibly deep, and sinks down and down and down with all the calm weight of the water subduing him.

There is very little of himself in the way he dances; there is the music, and the choreography, and whatever complex art of emotion it draws out of him. 

_Don’t you get scared?_ Yeosang had asked, the thought-memory muffled through the water filling San’s ears. _What if you can’t come back?_

Sometimes he doesn’t, he hadn’t had the heart to tell Yeosang. Sometimes he will be down there silent and dormant under the weight of his own unshakable focus for hours at a time, until he surfaces with a ragged gasp for air to find his arms trembling and his legs too weak to stand. 

Once he’d had to call Seonghwa, near tears, to take him home. 

Seonghwa is careful with his concern. Never overbearing, and never harsh. Always silent when San needs silence, and always near when San needs something to hold, something to cling to, something to remind him that he’s real, that he’s alive, that there is a world outside of the near-uncontrollable hyperfocus his mind plunges into dance. 

_It’s like you’re possessed,_ Seonghwa told him, a feather-light hand stroking down his sweat-soaked spine while San slumped half unconscious in exhaustion against his chest, too tired even to cry. _It’s like the Wilis got you, Sannie._

He’s always felt something for Albrecht, and always found it so easy to sink into his Act II Variation. That prescribed force of external control, the half-dream sensation of being puppeteered. A marionette on strings jumping, jumping, jumping, jumping - and then, once those strings are cut, all that is left of him collapses to the ground. Breaths heavy, barely clinging to life.

And still, given the strength to stand, he will dance again.

Months of rehearsal to audition with a variation that lasts little over a minute. 

It’s flawless, he knows, opening his eyes to the scuffed vinyl of a different studio room before his face, the exhaustion that clings to him at once both natural and completely alien. He can’t remember much of the past two hours, but the evaluators are thanking him for his time and Yeosang is watching him with shrewd, careful eyes from the piano in the corner of the room. 

It’s flawless, he thinks. 

But he can’t quite remember a single beat of it.

He bows to the table, and to Yeosang. Thanks them for the opportunity. Steps out into the hall. Closes the heavy door behind him. 

There are two more dancers out there waiting to perform and San nods to them. They nod back in that clipped, distracted manner with which one can only expect from a coworker and competitor, and San tries to swallow down the prickle of anxiety that comes with lost time with the vague explanation that he’s hungry and he ought to find Seonghwa for lunch.

It was flawless, he hopes.

He has no real way of knowing.

He doesn't know if he's ever understood the difference between madness and instinct.


	2. lescaut

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ot8 and woosan reuniting and a bit of seongjoong, cw for small alcohol intake ??

San  _ has  _ been to Yunho’s studio before - back when it was little more than a few milk crates scattered around an upturned cable reel and some warped mirrors leaning against one of the bare warehouse walls. 

He'd been so proud of it then, more than two years ago now. His own studio space, sketching out in broad gestures for San and Seonghwa to imagine new mirrors, workable flooring, a sound system, a lounge set up as a breakroom. 

San doesn’t know if it's anything like what Yunho had planned, but it's everything and more than what San had imagined. Still a raw, bare-walled warehouse, but with an air of homeliness that seems to emerge everywhere Yunho leaves his mark. 

The cable reel is still there, is the first thing San notices. A raw-wood table slapped over with a tableau of stickers and posca graffiti, tags from every one of Yunho’s students who've come and gone since opening those heavy side-rolling doors. A centrepiece to the loungeroom he's arranged in the far half of the studio made from mixed and matched pieces of haggled sidewalk couches and the old leather lounge they’d moved out of their apartment long ago. 

He'd made true on his promise for new mirrors, broad and free-standing beneath the high ceiling upon a wooden stage raised up from the harsh concrete floor, and in another corner San sees he's cleaned out the cobwebbed old shipping container and soundproofed it against the loose, echoing acoustics of the warehouse, a standing microphone set up as though someone had just recently stepped away from the makeshift booth. 

"Ooh," Yunho calls out from the breakroom, twisting in his armchair with an arm flung over the back to look at San, a can of something cold dripping condensation over his hands - always so startlingly elegant despite their size, and the size of the man they belong to. "Sannie's here!"

San arches a brow, eyes darting over faces friendly or familiar. Seonghwa is there already, spread out on their leather couch, crisp and clean even at rest, even after a long day's work. There's Yeosang with his ankles crossed primly over Yunho’s thigh, the cub-like Jongho perched on a pilfered barstool like something watchful and not yet wary, Mingi sharp-eyed and sharp-faced looking up from where he’s pulled a chair up to the table, a pen in his hand and a notebook spread out messy before him.

"Sannie's watching us," Yunho narrates as though San isn't the one being watched, five sets of eyes on him. "Is he gonna come in?"

He forces himself to scoff a laugh, shakes off the sudden nerves he feels sitting in the corners of his smile and picks up his feet, drops his bag by the couch and reaches over Yunho’s shoulder for the bag of chips he offers up, recklessly ruffles Yeosang's hair as he passes where his head is hanging off the arm of the chair and passes what he hopes are courteous nods to the others while he settles onto the low arm of Seonghwa’s lounge. 

"You just missed ice run," Yunho half-scolds, tipping his head back to pour what remains of the chip crumbs into his mouth. "We thought Wooyoung was the latest so we sent him instead."

"Oh no," San deadpans, putting a chip in his mouth and speaking around it. "I'll be sure to come a little bit less than late next time, so you can steal my labour properly." He forces himself to ignore the implication, the subtle inference that they'd long since given up on San accepting any of Yunho's invitations to socialise outside of the small sphere of Seonghwa.

A prickle of guilt for his own reluctance to entertain the idea of new friends that he smothers beneath a close-lipped smile that will show his dimples, make him seem small and inoffensive to anyone he might have offended. 

He doesn't want to admit that he's intimidated by Mingi's silence when he's near, or by the apologies that Yunho often gives for Jongho’s absence, citing  _ trainee  _ and  _ schedule  _ and  _ a company - sorry, I don't think I can say which one  _ as excuses. But Mingi is a closed book to San, and Jongho lives in a world too distant, too bright and shining. He doesn’t know how to speak to them, or what to say, or how he ought to be for them to find some worth in him.

"Hongjoong isn't here yet either," Yeosang reminds the room without looking away from where they're typing at the phone held above their face.

"God forbid anyone make Hongjoong get ice," Jongho warns, leaning his stool precariously on two legs to steal a bag of beef jerky from Mingi's table. 

"God forbid anyone arrive later than him," Mingi corrects, tapping his pen against the edge of the table. "Unless you want to get lectured on punctuality for twenty minutes."

"Despite him turning up an hour late," Yeosang adds, still without looking up.

"He's still working," Seonghwa interjects, glancing briefly at his phone before once more laying it face-down on his thigh.

"Yeah," Yeosang barks a brusque laugh, a tightness entering his voice when he half-addresses Seonghwa, "when is he  _ not?" _

"Is he still coming?" Jongho asks, tearing a strip of jerky between his teeth.

Seonghwa starts to answer, but his soft affirmative is quickly cut off by Mingi's startlingly low voice correcting, "Not if he falls asleep."

"Honestly," Yunho agrees, San listening in keenly for any bounce-around context he can piece together on the Hongjoong of whom Seonghwa so jealously guards any information, for the sake of his own sanity lest San tease him more than his last nerve can take. "I think I might prefer it if he falls asleep."

There are unanimous mumbles of agreement, and even Seonghwa purses his lips with a silent nod before Mingi admits, "I kinda wanna see how long he can go without sleeping."

"I don't," Jongho vehemently counters.

"I once saw him after three days straight," Yeosang admits, at last tucking his phone into the couch beside him and propping himself up on an elbow. 

"What was he like?" Yunho prompts with a wide-eyed curiosity much akin to the way someone might ask for the story behind a truly horrific scar.

Yeosang pauses for a moment, tilts his head in consideration as though searching for the right word. "Unhinged."

This - all of this and everything that everyone has previously said with regards to Hongjoong - paints a certain picture for San: A strict, perhaps even commanding workaholic of a man. Somewhat fatherly, in a sense - a scolding sort of reassurance to their group, but one they can’t help but want to avoid when it comes to having fun. 

San can’t help but steal a glance at Seonghwa, curious that he would fall for someone so…  _ regular.  _

Park Seonghwa is, of course, nothing short of the grace and distant-beauty magnitude of a star in the night sky and while he has his peculiarities - the terse passivity with which he reprimands San or Yunho for leaving dishes on the bench or wet clothes in the washing machine, the strict and pedantic keeping of his schedule, the way expressions sometimes twist on his face as though he never quite learned how to smile no matter how earnestly he means it - he is an ambrosial chalice held above the earth, overflowing with an almost overwhelming sort of perfect imperfection.

This is to say that he is almost otherworldly in his beautiful strangeness at times, elegiac and lovely, and it seems incongruous that Seonghwa might love someone undeserving of him, or unappreciative of all that he is. 

In short, San isn’t sure he’s going to particularly like this Hongjoong. Not if he’s anything like how he seems.

But it isn't long before Seonghwa’s phone chimes with a message and, upon checking it, he lets out a gently startled, "Oh," before looking up to address the room. "He’s here," he tells them, a slight confusion laced in his words.

Mingi glances at Seonghwa, his sharp eyes narrowing further in an equal gesture of confusion before he copies Seonghwa’s statement of, "Oh," his expression clearing as he glances between the notebook and the recording booth. "He meant  _ my  _ work."

"Are you even ready?" Yunho asks, his brow furrowing in Mingi's direction.

He shrugs, a broad, loose gesture and leans back in his chair, tosses his pen onto the table. "I can wing it."

Jongho snorts a callous laugh and bullies, "And when he asks why your lyrics keep changing…? Then what?"

"How about this," Yunho leans forward over Yeosang’s legs, his smile eager and expectant. "He's gonna wanna sit down for a bit, right? And he's only productive when Wooyoung’s not around. So we stall him for a few minutes, wait for Wooyoung to black swan his way in and derail all Hongjoong’s plans, then Mingi gets out of jail free and Hongjoong won't have new raws to stay up 'til four o'clock editing."

"What aren't I editing?" someone calls from the door behind Yunho, and six heads whip around to watch someone meander in with a backpack slung over one shoulder and a laptop bag swinging from his hand, an oversized cardigan hanging off his frame and more piercings than San has ever seen outside of Itaewon studding his ears.

For all this, San’s first thought is that Hongjoong is…smaller. Than he'd expected.

Which isn’t to say he’s short exactly, but he’s certainly an inch or so shorter than San, and while San doesn’t exactly consider himself  _ small _ he finds he’d expected from the way people talk about him for Hongjoong to somehow be larger than life. An imposing figure like Mingi, perhaps; tall and quiet with an air of command and control. Perhaps even somewhat domineering. 

But the man who walks into the studio is not tall like Mingi, and not quiet in the same way that Mingi is quiet, and despite the way every head in the room turns to watch him enter very little about him seems particularly domineering. 

There are tired bags under Hongjoong’s eyes that he’s done well at hiding beneath makeup, and a weariness that seems equal parts peaceful and vaguely harassed in the way he scrubs a hand through the back of his silver-white hair, flaring the short black roots beneath the bleach when he tosses his head to shake away a yawn.

Despite the near-pleasant exhaustion that seems to drape from his shoulders like a cloak he makes sure to greet everyone in turn - tossing an overhead wave to Yeosang, slapping his hand against Mingi’s open palm before allowing himself to get lifted into a hug by Yunho, bumping his fist against Jongho’s as he passes to offer a hand, his pinky nail painted a pretty jewel-dark blue, for San to shake with a smile that pitches a genuine warmth to settle light and unexpected in San’s stomach. 

“San, right?” he reassures his memory. “Yunho hasn't stopped talking about us meeting you.”

Something of San’s surprise (and perhaps another brief flash of guilt) must register on his face because Hongjoong smiles - reassuring, knowing, and something like a quiet laugh caught in the corners of his lips - before he pats Seonghwa’s knee aside and slumps to collapse messily into the couch, his bags falling around him and his head falling to the backrest with a gentle, explosive sigh. 

Just as Yunho had predicted.

He settles for a moment, seems to melt deeply against the old leather before turning his head this way and that, scanning the room and asking, “Where’s Wooyoung?”

“He went to get ice,” Mingi’s words muffle past the food in his mouth. “About ten minutes ago.”

“Across the road?” Hongjoong squints, still not lifting his heavy-looking head. Vague nods from around the room. “And none of you called him? After ten minutes?”

Everyone seems to shoot each other quiet glances, as though realising their absentminded mistake.

Hongjoong doesn’t sigh this time - doesn’t make any legitimate indication of disappointment but to twist in his seat a little so he can pull his phone from his pocket, not sitting up at all from where he’s slumped down in the couch while he unlocks it, the blue glow of the screen painting his face white and highlighting the sharp point of his small nose, the gentle line of his jaw. The carelessness with which he sits is a devastating oxymoron to the absentminded charisma with which his small hands hold a phone almost too big for them, and while San can't look either away from him or directly at him, he's beginning to understand why Hongjoong might be the sort of person who could command equal parts adoration and concern, or could threaten Yeosang into fixing crumbling friendships, or convince Seonghwa to fall in love.

“I’ll get it, Joong,” Yunho tries to say, but Hongjoong just waves him off and puts the phone to his ear.

“He’ll actually answer for me,” he reasons, and San catches Yeosang briefly cocking a brow with an appreciative nod, as though admitting the marvelous feat of anyone being able to make this Wooyoung pick up a call.

A second of silence in which San learns the volume of Hongjoong’s calls are turned so loud that even he can hear the ring from the other end of the couch before the call connects to someone demanding a flustered,  _ “What?” _

“Young-ah?” Hongjoong says. “Where are you?”

_ “I went to get ice!” _

It’s petulant and somewhat whiny, as though this Wooyoung is put out for being evidently scolded in his gallant act of running errands as punishment for being late. Hongjoong frowns, pulls his phone away and puts it on speaker to air a white noise crackle of what takes San a moment to realise is skateboard wheels rolling across pavement. 

“There’s a place across the road,” Hongjoong says like it’s a question, exasperated and confused, placing his phone on his knee. 

_ “They were out,”  _ Wooyoung’s voice muffles, still with that high-pitched note of playing victim, and then matures in the next breath when he says,  _ “Hang on, I’m nearly there,”  _ before the call disconnects.

“If he keeps hanging up on me,” Hongjoong mumbles, jabbing a delicate finger at his phone screen, “he and I are going to have  _ words.”  _ Despite whatever San had expected to think of Hongjoong, this almost sounds like an empty threat.

He doesn’t miss the way Seonghwa’s hand goes to Hongjoong’s leg, briefly pats a silent reassurance against his thigh before settling there, silent and unobtrusive. 

Before he can think upon it too much though - Seonghwa who is always receptive of others’ affections yet rarely initiates it himself patting at someone more like it’s instinct than conscious thought - there is a clatter of wheels out the door and the wooden sound of a skateboard being popped before a very frustrated-looking someone shoulders his way through in a red satin jacket, the axle of a board hanging from one tattooed hand and a dripping bag of ice from the other.

San’s heart clatters, gives a swollen, aching  _ thump  _ as though he’d just missed a step going downstairs, and it nearly drowns out Yunho's woop for a successful black swan and Mingi announcing, “Victorious he returns!”

Everything feels tilted, somehow breathless, and San can’t pull his eyes away.

The stranger lifts the hand holding his board, points accusingly at Mingi as he continues to stride forcefully across the studio space, the momentum of his journey still carrying him. “You,” he says, a menacing glare. “You’ll be first.”

Mingi tilts his head back for a drink and doesn’t seem at all perturbed by the threat. 

It could be a coincidence. There are many red jackets in this world, and many tattooed hands.

“I am  _ never,”  _ he continues, storming past Mingi without laying a finger on him, “doing  _ anything,  _ ever again, for any of you,” he says, even as he puts down his board and squats by the bucket of drinks beside where San is perched, light and nervous and tense, tearing open the bag of ice and pouring it in.

He can’t look away from the hypnotic glimmer of too many delicate chains swinging from too many piercings in his ears. He is drowning in the space of sun-warm skin between the cold ink of his tattoos.

“So where’d you go?” Hongjoong asks, no indication whatsoever in his voice of the words that he promised to have.

“I went,” he points wildly, “a kilometer down the road. To the nearest gas station.”

“You could have just come back,” Yeosang mumbles into his cup. “It’s not a big deal.”

And none of them knew the undefinable change, small but somehow momentous, that has stilled San’s breath in his lungs - as though everything had shifted just slightly to the right in the space between one blink and the next.

“I do all of this for you,” he stands up, plants his hands on his hips, the head of a snake peering from beneath the cuff of his sleeve, an eye staring blank and intent from the other, “and I don’t get a single  _ Thank you, Wooyoung, for all your hard work.” _

San feels dizzy, all off-balance and wrong-footed. He’d wanted to know that stranger’s name, if only so he could say it just once.

“Thank you, Wooyoung,” Hongjoong doesn’t speak up so much as speak plainly, the quiet warm-tired pitch of his voice carrying easily through the group as though every ear is tuned to hear him and no voice would dare speak over him. “I was worried when I heard you were gone so long.”

Like a spell cast over him, the effect is immediate. Wooyoung’s affected irritation drops away the same as his fists drop from his hips and he smooths a hand over his loose hair looking equal parts scolded and petulant, his lower lip pushed slightly into a surly pout that shows off the small mole that rests upon the pink curve of it. 

He’d only seen it once in a time that felt more like a dream than real, but San knows he could never have mistaken something like that. Such a small, perfect detail that he could never have dreamed up. 

“Yeah, well, don’t,” he backtracks, immediately sullen in the face of Hongjoong’s calm sincerity, dipping to dig a can from the bottom of all that ice, his inked hand coming back wet and slightly pink from the cold bite of it. “I’m not paying for your botox next time you have an existential crisis over your frown lines.”

“You’ll wish he wanted botox,” Yeosang says around the lip of his drink, “so you can pretend you don’t notice when he’s angry.”

“He already pretends he doesn’t notice when I’m angry,” Hongjoong rolls his eyes, a complex tone of lighthearted severity in the glare he shoots at the man stepping nonchalantly past San, for all the world as though he hadn't noticed him sitting there shaken and small. “Maybe he should treat me, for all the effort I waste on scolding him.”

“Is this seat taken?” Wooyoung pointedly ignores Hongjoong, gestures at Seonghwa’s lap.

“I don’t- NGH…” Seonghwa wheezes, the breath punched out of him with the force of Wooyoung dropping all his weight onto his lap,  _ “...heavy.” _

“It’s you.”

After all that time spent speechless, and now with Wooyoung right beside him - the quick of his smile lighting the room, black-painted nails picking under the tab of the can to press it open, all dazzling laughter and the sweet-sour pitch of a voice shaped like a pout, a snake uncoiling from his skin to wind around San’s throat, that’s all he can manage to say.

Wooyoung looks at him and, as with every other part of him, San is reminded only then of the strange power of those eyes, the oceanic pull of them. He is the tide inching back, evaluating and grand, and San is the driftwood and detritus laid out in disturbed lines along the sand. 

He tilts his head in a curious question, playful whitecaps teasing the sky at a distance just too far to reach despite that he is sitting right next to San, despite that he is looking right at him, despite the way he pinches his lower lip between his teeth and drags blunt incisors unthinkingly over the little mole that rests there. “Have we met?”

Hongjoong peers around Wooyoung, glances between the two of them and asks with a veiled kind of curiosity, forcibly blase, “You know each other?”

“No, I…” San fumbles, glances around for an answer and finds seven pairs of eyes trained on him, watching him, embarrassment creeping like heat up the back of his neck. “On the bus,” he stumbles, cornered back into meeting Wooyoung’s passively curious gaze. “A few days ago, or… You fell on me and,” San gestures vaguely, at a loss, too dizzy in the moment to realise if he might have spoken incorrectly or informally, or if Wooyoung has simply forgotten altogether because San is sure, beyond certain, that Wooyoung is the same man who had fallen against him, and then caught him, and then let him drift off against his shoulder.

“A few days?” Wooyoung asks, confusion laced through the chime of his voice, but when he blinks his expression clears and the reserved distance in his eyes surges nearer, closes in on a king tide when he clicks a finger and excitedly slaps at San’s knee, bouncing in his place on Seonghwa’s lap (ignorant of the punched-out sounds of protest it wrenches from Seonghwa’s throat) while he crows, “Yes, yes! Yesterday, it was yesterday! I saw you looking all tired and lonely so I made you come sit with me, yeah!”

San can’t help but arch his brows, surprise filtering through his embarrassed caution. “That’s why?” he pushes, doesn’t miss the way Wooyoung has forgotten to withdraw his hand, just absentmindedly left it draped over San’s knee. The ocean lapping at the sand. “I thought you felt bad for pushing me over.”

“I pushed you over because I felt bad,” Wooyoung is quick to correct, and doesn’t seem to know that perhaps he ought to hold back when he says, “you looked miserable, and I was kinda bored. I really thought I’d never see you again.”

Hongjoong, at San’s apparent reluctance to perhaps punch Wooyoung in the face, seems to relax, sinking back into his seat with an exasperated sort of huff. “Count me surprised,” he mumbles, and San wonders if he’d been on edge to defend Wooyoung in the case of San somehow having a bad impression of him, and then he thinks of Wooyoung’s insistence that night of ensuring San didn’t resent him and has to wonder how many times Hongjoong might have had to clean up a mess Wooyoung had made.

“Did you get tired of causing trouble?” Seonghwa has to ask, poking at Wooyoung’s waist until he wriggles away and slides sideways off his lap into the space between the armrest and Seonghwa’s thigh.

“Every day you wake up and choose anarchy,” Yeosang agrees, nodding gravely in Wooyoung’s direction.

“Why are you bullying me?” Wooyoung scowls, his leg still draped over Seonghwa’s lap and his head propped unconcerned and perhaps unaware against San’s hip. “I didn’t do anything wrong!”

“Yeah,” Mingi confirms without looking up, reaching for another chip from the torn-open bag, “that’s the surprising part.”

“Friendship ended with all of you,” he mumbles into his drink, “now he’s my new best friend.”

“Oh, really?” Yeosang arches a brow, leaning forward to rest his elbows atop his folded knee. “What’s his name?”

Wooyoung pauses, tilts his head consideringly before angling himself just enough so he can tip back against San’s thigh and  _ look at him.  _

Look at him with his head angled back, his loose hair splayed across San’s lap and his immeasurable eyes catching the lights overhead and shining with something brighter and more beautiful, and San is made to think of sunlight shattering off dark ocean waves, the gold filigree of something so transient and beautiful it is impossible to put into words. 

“San,” he says, the answer to an unasked question pulling from his lips as though snatched by a saltwater breeze. 

He’s entranced all over again by the reminder of how this stranger’s face, how Wooyoung’s face crumples and creases into a smile - broad and helplessly lovely, his eyes folded into perfect paintbrush arcs and his teeth bared in something between a promise and a threat. 

“San~ie~” Wooyoung chimes effortless and sweet and San is suddenly glad he’s put off for so long Yeosang’s insistence that he cut his hair, for the way the length of it might hide the heat crawling up the back of his neck. “Is that alright?”

“I don’t mind.” He is genuinely surprised at how composed his voice sounds, but he can feel Yeosang’s eyes boring into him from across the room, that silent knowing prickling the discomfort of being seen like a chill down San’s spine.

“Who’s in charge of music, anyway?” Jongho interrupts whatever strange, undefinable thing is unfurling in the pit of San’s stomach at the sight of Wooyoung smiling up at him like that, head resting easily in his lap, but all the same San is almost reluctant to extract himself from the dignified discomfort of it all. 

Hongjoong starts to say, “I can-” before he’s interrupted by at least three voices calling  _ No  _ in no uncertain terms. 

“Nothing against Conan Gray,” Yeosang says, “but if you bring this mood down I’m going to throw myself in the river and you’ll see me on the news in the morning.”

“Your violent disapproval is noted, Yeosang,” Hongjoong almost sulks, slumping back once more from where he’d half sat up from his comfortable slouch. 

“Should we pull?” Yunho suggests, standing up with a bag of M&M’s in hand, offering it out for Yeosang to pick one out before stretching a long arm out for Jongho and Mingi to go next, who glances quickly at what they got before hiding it behind their backs, then moving over to the couch and rattling the bag in front of Hongjoong’s sullen face. Seonghwa reaches out to take one, and Wooyoung half-lifts himself off San’s lap to scoop a large handful and tip all but one into his mouth.

San glances quickly between the bag Yunho is offering him and everyone else studying whatever colour they’d pulled before hiding the small chocolate from everyone else’s sight, quickly following their lead.

Blue. Okay. 

He palms the sweet, tries not to wince against the way it will likely stick and stain his palm, and Yunho spins a dramatic circle to round on the group.

“Alright,” he announces, reaching blindly into the bag. “Anyone who doubles up, paper scissors rock. I’ve got… brown. Anyone got brown?” he calls loudly, holding up the M&M for everyone to see. A few surreptitious glances around the room, a few people shaking their heads. “No? Okay,” he tosses it into the air and catches it in his mouth, crunching it between his teeth before he pulls another. “Orange!” he calls out next, and Wooyoung gives a violent shriek, kicking up from the couch to stand with near-manic laughter tumbling from his lips - glass chimes caught in the wind.

_ “No,”  _ Yeosang begs over Jongho’s pained groan, but all Wooyoung does is shove his drink into San’s hand, flash the orange M&M in his hand and stick his tongue out, entirely unapologetic as he rushes towards the mixer in the corner, completely unbothered by Mingi throwing his own red chocolate at the back of his head.

_ “Love is nothing stronger!” _ Wooyoung cries out as he plugs his phone into the AUX, to which Yunho enthusiastically sings out,  _ “Than a boy with, than a boy with love~”  _ moments before a song that San is certain he’s familiar with, playing in car radios or department stores, blasts out from the almost-too-loud studio speakers.

“I’m Jimin!” Wooyoung dibs, dashing to the marked stage-like floor installed before the wall of mirrors, quickly joined by an enthusiastic and completely unapologetic Yunho while Jongho feigns exhaustion scratching at his eye and Yeosang rolls his to the heavens.

“I’m Wooyoung and I wanna dance  _ Boy With Luv,”  _ Jongho mocks, pitching his voice to the same octave as Wooyoung’s with almost unnerving accuracy.

_ “Yeosang!”  _ Wooyoung screeches from the studio space, “Be my Jin or six years means  _ nothing!” _

Yeosang once more rolls his eyes, but this time stands to accompany the movement, grudgingly following Wooyoung and Yunho to the mirrors with a mutter framed artistically loud enough to just barely carry over the music, “Well how can I turn down an offer like that.”

And then they're dancing, the learned choreography of it apparent but also  _ effortless  _ in a way that ballet never is; in a way that San has over the years since moving to Seoul - and admittedly perhaps even long before then - forgotten that it could be. Loose line, flexible shoulders, an almost addictive punctuation of liquidity in the way they move together, around each other, a formation shifting and changing in a way completely unlike Balanchine’s  _ Jewels  _ and yet somewhere along the dim-lit line of his life San seems to have forgotten any other terms he might use to describe it. 

The three of them dancing around each other until, despite his vocal rejection of the concept, Jongho can't seem to help himself from first humming the melody, then sprinkling in lyrics, and then, come the chorus, slipping off his chair and singing out loud, his voice as powerful as he seems and somehow startlingly pitch-perfect. 

There's no excuse for him at that point to not join them at the mirrors, and when he does San can't decide if his initial rejection of the idea makes more or less sense for the way he follows every beat of the choreography as though it's ingrained into him - and this more than anything is what surprises San about Jongho. That his apparent inclination as someone at rest to stay at rest is evidently more an element of him taking this time away from whatever schedule he is kept busy with to relax, and less some proclivity towards Newton's First Law.

He knows the dance, yes, but more than that he  _ can  _ dance - and dance well. More strength and emphasis in his movements than Yunho's playful clarity or Yeosang's delicate articulation, or Wooyoung’s effortless fluidity. 

And then there is a break and a subtle drop, and Hongjoong picks up the rap verse with a distracted punctuality, and the playful stylisation of his words bubbles and bursts within San's chest like a gust of breath released underwater, pocketed air tickling past his outstretched fingers.

"Mingi!" Hongjoong calls out on beat once his lines are done, pointing a finger and clicking at where Mingi is studiously twisting a napkin into the shape of a rose. "Show me your best Namjoon!"

San has never had the opportunity, he thinks, to bear witness to the way Mingi’s sharp eyes can crease and narrow into a smile, all but disappearing into the amused breadth of the grin that cracks across his face and the round, loose laugh that tumbles out of him. 

"You're on," he accepts Hongjoong’s challenge with a reckless grin, downing what's left of his drink and kicking his chair away from the table so he can saunter towards the dance floor in a manner San can only describe as  _ extremely fucking cool.  _

He has charisma when he chooses to turn it on, an amount that politicians and performers would kill for, and when he takes the stage between where Jongho, Yunho, Wooyoung and Yeosang have parted to let him stand, the silky-coarse articulation of his deep voice is put to lines that he raps out, beat for beat even when he misses a word. He draws them down to meet around him, and Yunho flourishes the rose Mingi had been making, at some point passed to him with a clever sleight of hand, and tosses it haphazardly in the direction of the couch from where Hongjoong, Seonghwa and San are watching, helpless laughter for the unprompted performance pulling at all of them.

When they break from the formation to Jongho's enthusiastic chorus Mingi circles away from the mirrors, meanders towards the sound system while they effortlessly fill the space he left, the harsh clap of their shoes against the wood and their breathless bursts of laughter at once both familiar and completely foreign to San. 

As soon as the song comes to an end though, each of them breathing heavily through their wide grins and Yeosang dramatically collapsing to the floor out of their ending pose, Mingi takes up Wooyoung’s phone and shuffles through until he finds another playlist, the music quickly ramping up to something markedly more street-pop than whatever Wooyoung had chosen.

_ "Hey!"  _ he yelps, leaping off the stage and dashing over to Mingi. "What are you doing, asshole?"

"Exercising my veto,  _ asshole,"  _ Mingi responds, effortlessly blase in the face of a faceful of Wooyoung.

"I mean it's only half past," he presses, trailing after Mingi leaving the sound system for his abandoned chair, "are you sure you wanna do that?"

"Wooyoung," Mingi brushes him off without a second glance, "listening to that one song on repeat is guaranteed to make you sterile."

The unrepentant stink eye that Wooyoung gives the back of Mingi's head is truly a sight to behold, but in the face of laws written with the intent of preserving an anarchistic friendship among seven wildly different people, his only preservering argument is to mutter, "Maybe I  _ want  _ to be sterile," before strutting past in a huff to reclaim the bare sliver of his seat between Seonghwa and San.

"So, San-ah," Wooyoung says like it's a challenge, twisting to face San with an elbow propped on the back of the lounge, "do  _ you  _ like BTS?"

San can only blink down at him, lips parting. "I don't know," is his truthful admission. "I guess?"

His pretty dark-lined eyes narrow, as though trying to determine whether San could possibly be telling the truth - or perhaps whether anyone could possibly have no strong opinion on what San is quickly piecing together is his favourite group - but before he can give voice to the scathing remark that San can  _ see  _ sitting on his tongue, Hongjoong is asking, "Wooyoung did you use my laptop?" over the beat-heavy music Mingi is absentmindedly rapping along to while he bows his head over his notebook.

"Um," Wooyoung articulates, glancing over his shoulder to where Hongjoong has pulled his computer onto his knees, a delicate frown creasing his brow while his quick, careful fingers trace over the trackpad. "Depends. Why?"

"Because it looks like your 4K raws have devoured my internal storage," Hongjoong says, a near painfully conversational tone to the silent frustration San can see in the lock of his teeth and the sharp breath he draws between them.

Wooyoung glances at the ceiling, his round lips parted slightly as he thinks, before he announces, "Yes, I did! Because all my SDs were full and I needed one, but your hard drive was also full, so I put them there until I can clear space."

From across the table, San can see Yunho watching the exchange with building enthusiasm, and when Hongjoong pushes up beneath his glasses to rub at the inner corner of his eye before releasing a long, measured sigh and reluctantly closing the lid of his laptop he realises this is exactly what Yunho envisioned for Wooyoung interrupting Hongjoong’s work.

"Can you get them off before tomorrow, please?" is all Hongjoong can say in the face of Wooyoung’s unapologetic explanation. "I need to work and I can't even open Adobe."

"That's just what you get for using Adobe," Wooyoung counters, already leaning around San to dig a fresh drink from the bucket of ice on the floor. "I don't see how it's my fault."

Probably everyone  _ except  _ Wooyoung sees the hard stare Hongjoong levels at the back of his head, and the way his mouth twitches as though he wants desperately to say something and is giving a truly monumental effort to holding himself back.

"Sometimes I wonder," Yeosang muses out loud, "if he actually secretly wants Hongjoong to beat the shit out of him, just to see what it would be like."

"Definitely a masochist," Mingi agrees with a grave nod, and San can’t help but fit a pitying smile on his face and settle a hand on Wooyoung's head to ruffle his loose hair - perhaps too bold, too familiar of a gesture, but oblivious Wooyoung only hums pleasantly and leans in against his side as though encouraging the soft touch. 

"I don't know if he's wrong, though," Yunho argues, considering. "Given the opportunity I know  _ I'd  _ like to get beat up by Hongjoong."

"Physically I could beat him in a fight," Jongho adds, "but emotionally?" He shakes his head despairingly. 

Hongjoong slumps back to sink into the lounge once more, looks around the room and clicks his tongue before turning his cheek. “Assuming I have the energy, emotional or physical, to fight any of you,” he scolds, arms folded over his chest. 

Seonghwa breathes a quiet laugh and counters, his voice always so gentle and smooth, “And yet you always seem to find it somewhere.”

Hongjoong glares at him from the corner of one scathing eye for a long moment before twisting roughly in his seat to land a soft punch into Seonghwa’s stomach, to which he dutifully doubles over in a mockery of pain, laughing all the while.

“See?” he wheezes, grinning through it with that fake-forced smile of his that is rarely either faked or forced, and San feels a strange emptiness, an odd sort of regret in the pit of his stomach to the way his eyes narrow and crease on that smile, to the way the lights caught like stars in them seem to shine all the more brilliantly to Hongjoong’s teasing. 

He doesn’t feel regret for Seonghwa, he is soon to realise, a pleasant yearning settling into that emptiness and a smile curling helplessly onto his lips. More than that, he regrets that he hasn’t been here to see it. That he’s missed so much of Seonghwa’s happiness for the sake of what he can only say now is his own cowardice.

“Hey,” Wooyoung props his elbow upon San’s thigh, bumps his new drink against the one he’d left and forgotten in San’s hand with a roll of his pretty eyes and a teasing smirk tugging at his lips, “cheers to the happy couple, right?”

“We’re not-” Seonghwa starts to say, but gives up on a sigh to Wooyoung throwing his head back to drink, a finger held up in Seonghwa’s face to silence him while downs more than a few mouthfuls. Seonghwa glances to San, helplessly begging for some sort of defence, but with that empty warmth aching in his stomach San will only arch a teasing brow at the expense of his wordless plea and drink from Wooyoung’s cup.

He stops after little more than a sip, not in any pursuit of drunkenness despite the hour and the day and the absence of any schedule come morning. But because of this he is perhaps the only one who notices Seonghwa’s expression shift from offended to considering, and then briefly to something far too  _ knowing  _ before he shutters it away, a clearly falsified air of cold stoicism on his princely face when he turns in his seat to face them, legs crossed primly to appraise them over the rim of his own barely-touched drink.

“I see Wooyoung has recruited his new friend to his ill-favoured plight,” Seonghwa articulates, arching a round brow. “How quickly your loyalties change, San.”

San narrows his eyes, challenges Seonghwa to follow through. “And what if they do?” he counters, angles his chin in a way he has seen a hundred times in studio hall mirrors to make him seem cocky, confrontational, and more than a little bit smug.

“Should we leave San in charge of Wooyoung for a day?” Yeosang proposes from across the table, sipping their drink with a clinical weariness about their scathingly narrowed eyes. “See if he lasts.”

“Hey,” Yunho intervenes, raising his hands between them, “hey. I don’t think we should  _ haze  _ him.”

_ “Hey,”  _ Wooyoung interrupts, the sharp-sweet pitch of his offence equally as performative as anyone else’s input. “I am a  _ delight  _ to be around.”

“In small doses, sure,” Mingi pretends to agree.

Wooyoung narrows his eyes. “You’re on thin ice tonight.”

“What are you gonna do,” Mingi’s low voice taunts. “Squeal me to death?”

“Given the opportunity, I think he could,” San finds himself bold enough to interject. 

His reward for such courage is to have Wooyoung rounding on him, an arm still draped over San’s leg, demanding, “Who’s side are you on?”

“There are sides?” he pretends to feign ignorance. To Wooyoung’s narrowed eyes a laugh falls almost unbidden past his lips. “Of course,” he appeases his irritation before it can overflow. “I’ll take your side if you take mine.”

It sounds a little too confident when he says it out loud, a little too forward. A little too much of a promise for him to make so quickly, so soon, and to find that he wants a little too much to follow through.

But it’s so compelling, so rewarding, so much worth the risk of giving too much of himself too quickly with the way Wooyoung smiles at him as though that alone might be enough to sustain San through the cataclysm of realising that the man he’d dreamed about after meeting only once is now all but draped across his lap and looking at him with eyes that remind him of the warm sun’s reflection on ocean waves that whitecap and dance to play with the wind that tosses them whichever way they please.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ngl this is the quickest ive ever written the second chapter of anything, and considering all i had planned for it was one sentence of 'meet again @ yunhos studio n woosan bonding yes' i think i did alright lmao
> 
> thank you all for your comments, they really helped me push through to get this out!!!!!! pls help me keep the momentum going lolll ilysm!!!


	3. albrecht

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this one's a bit shorter and also late but kinda i am really goin through it lol so let it simply be what it is u-u
> 
> cw for uhhhhh panic attack (san's rsd acting up a bit in the last stretch)

Seonghwa, ever responsible in his maturity, who knows always the time and place and company with which to indulge and ever bearing such a patient reluctance for the mess with which it walks hand in hand, announces his leave from the gathering a perceptive ten minutes or so before it might have turned from friendly drinks into something closer to a party outright.

“Will you be alright to get home?” he’d asked Hongjoong, who’d stretched out the unremarkable length of his body across the lounge after Seonghwa had vacated his seat to stand. 

“I’m fine,” Hongjoong had said through a yawn, sleepy eyes heavy and warm behind his glasses. “I might nap for a bit, then see how it goes.”

“Call me when you get back,” Seonghwa had pressed, to Hongjoong giving a lazy nod and waving a dainty hand as though to shoo him away.

“Get home safe,” he’d chimed in return, and then Seonghwa had glanced at San like a question and an invitation and permission, if need be, to silently ask whether San would rather go with him or stay.

It had been an easy decision to make - beyond Yunho and Yeosang San barely knew the people there. They’re friends more than they had been before San had ever made the effort to meet them, of course; more than strangers, more than people he knew or knew of, and perhaps more than acquaintances too. But all the same it’s been something of a long day, and a long week, and a long few months, and something in San feels as though he might make less of an impression on these people who he’s found he quite likes if he stays long enough to drink enough to make something of a fool of himself.

It doesn’t mean he doesn’t miss the open-air warmth of the warehouse that had less to do with the weather and more to do with their laughter, and it doesn’t mean he doesn’t hesitate to lose the comfortable thrill of having Wooyoung’s head leaning against his waist.

There’s a different kind of warmth, though, in coming home tired and happy and showering properly, changing his clothes and crawling into bed in a big shirt and underwear to cuddle around a pillow and scroll through the day’s more minor notifications on his phone. 

A few spam emails, an alert to pay rent to which he wars with himself for a moment, scrolling past and back up three times before forcing himself to transfer Seonghwa his share and swiping it away. Junyoung commenting on an instagram post asking how Seoul is, what it’s like, if San would want to show him around when he visits. His mother texting to ask when he’s free to call.

A quiet panic drops into the pit of his stomach and he considers simply swiping the message away, pretending he’d never seen it. 

Face half-buried in the pillow held to his chest he stares at the notification, unable quite to give a response or to move past without one. It isn’t that he doesn’t want to call his parents, he reluctantly admits, watching the screen dim and then go dark. It’s more that… he has no idea how he’s meant to call them. Or how to speak with them, when for the better part of his life he rarely has. 

He’s saved a decision by Seonghwa rolling his knuckles against the door, cracking it open to poke his head in. “You doing anything?” he asks, his voice sweet and calm, all gently muffled like a long-pile velvet, or the always somehow surprisingly soft touch of a rabbit’s fur. 

San shakes his head in answer, drops his phone away and lifts his arm for Seonghwa to come slip into the bed beside him, one of his long arms tucked around San’s shoulders and San’s cheek pressed to his chest, arms draped around his waist. 

Seonghwa only ever does this when he’s clean, his hair still damp from the shower and his skin still vaguely warm and humid. He always smells so nice like this - something deep and warm and almost-floral, like jasmine or sandalwood, but whenever San has tried to steal his body wash the scent sits uncomfortably on his skin, and he finds most of the reason he likes it is because it smells like Seonghwa’s hugs.

“Did you have fun today?” Seonghwa asks, the soft-muffled delicacy of his voice making a pleased tremble squeeze through San, and his arms tighten around Seonghwa to press him closer while he nods against his chest, a helpless smile tugging at his lips. “Made a new friend?” he prompts, and San almost wants to cry from the sudden burst of happiness that overthrows him. 

“I really like him,” San admits, his words quiet around the size of his heart in his throat. He can’t even pretend he isn’t smiling. He’s sure Seonghwa can hear it in his voice, and feel it pressed against his chest. “He’s unexpectedly nice.”

Seonghwa considers that for a moment, and then breathes a quiet laugh. “I guess he is. I suppose people don’t really expect him to be nice.”

“And he’s nice in unexpected ways,” San agrees. “It all kind of seems accidental, but every accident can’t do someone a favour.”

Seonghwa hums his agreement, presses his smiling lips to the top of San’s head. “He’s a different sort,” he murmurs, his fingers lightly scratching over the nape of San’s neck, into his hair. “Hongjoong said… Woo has this idea that his life will be easier if he seems mean and stupid, because then people won’t expect him to do the hardest thing in the world, which is to be clever and kind. But he can’t really help being clever or kind, no matter how hard he tries.”

San hums a quiet understanding, presses his cheek to Seonghwa’s chest and breathes in the clean warmth of him. He supposes it makes sense, even if it makes Wooyoung somewhat strange. He tilts into the way Seonghwa’s fingers card through his hair, his hand coming to cup the back of San’s head.

“How did your audition go?” he asks next, and San kind of knows that whatever feeling the question will draw out of him won’t exactly be a good one, so he abstractly refuses to let it sink in as he hums like a vague consideration.

“Fine,” he gives a rote answer, not letting himself think about it. “I think it went well. You can’t really tell, though,” he says, and Seonghwa hums as though he might like to disagree, but it isn’t a conversation that San wants to have and he seems to know that, or feel it in the way San presses closer to him and tangles their legs together, so he doesn’t push it. 

“What are you doing tomorrow?” he asks instead, reassuring San’s discomfort when he continues to drag his fingers through his hair.

“Nothing much,” he admits, letting his eyes fall closed to the gentle lull of it. Ignoring the anxious-guilt prickle of his mother’s message, shoving it away from where it doesn’t belong in the steady kindness of Seonghwa’s arms. “Wanna gym?”

Seonghwa gives a hum of confirmation, nods against the top of San’s head. “Morning?” he proposes. “We’ll get lunch after.”

“Lunch is good,” San agrees through a yawn, shuffling to arrange himself more comfortably in Seonghwa’s hold when he feels the tone of this conversation drifting closer towards sleep. “Is Hongjoong going to call you?” he half-reminds through a murmur.

Seonghwa shakes his head, but San can still feel his smile, the lax comfort draped heavy and loose through his body. “He’ll text around three, or maybe four,” he answers, dropping his hand from San’s hair and bundling him closer, cushioning San’s head on his arm. “Just a quick ‘goodnight’. He knows I like to know what time he sleeps, so I can be reasonably concerned about it,” he says, all the quiet affection and warmth in him when he talks about Hongjoong filling San’s heart to the brim.

“I like him too,” San admits, his fingers curling into the soft fabric of Seonghwa’s shirt. “He seems really…” He trails off, finding himself at something of a loss for words. He doesn’t know exactly what Hongjoong seems like. He doesn’t think he’s ever known someone like him before, in all his life. 

He wonders if there really are any words to describe him - any that might do him justice.

He seems, strangely enough, like a stranger with red hair telling San to take a leap of faith and strive with all his might to find a red flower atop a grave. Something to live for. _Your treasure._

“Yeah,” Seonghwa agrees on a silent breath of a laugh, nosing at San’s hair and pressing a kiss to the top of his head. “He is,” he confirms, as though he knows exactly the difficulty San is having and still hasn’t quite figured out an answer himself. 

San doesn’t want to ask _what about Yeosang,_ despite how much he wants to know. Because he knows if he asks then Seonghwa, dutiful and kind, will do his best to explain where Yeosang fits in the spaces between himself and Hongjoong, to articulate his aching thankfulness that Yeosang still loves at least one of them enough to try forgive the other for not loving them enough, and he will say it all with his quiet rabbit-fur voice full of an ache that San doesn’t want to make him feel. Not here, and not now. 

So he tucks himself closer against Seonghwa, at home in the home Seonghwa has made for him right next to his heart, and tells himself to think that it all might work out well in the end and Seonghwa and Hongjoong might be happy in love and Yeosang won’t have to feel as though they are second best in something which was never meant to hurt them. 

He knows they all know it - him and Seonghwa, and Hongjoong, and even Yeosang too though it might be too raw and painful right now for them to admit it. They all know that Seonghwa doesn’t love by halves, and that he has never loved Yeosang any less. And if Seonghwa had ever held Yeosang like this (he has, San knows he has) then he doesn’t doubt how Yeosang might have fallen for a different sort of love. 

Seonghwa is just that sort of person, San thinks with a pleasant half-happy smile sitting on his lips, who the whole world can’t help but fall in love with. 

* * *

The weekend passes without much consideration, half lazed away, half filled with menialities and minutiae. A brief indulgence into exhaustion which San has all but forgotten by the end of it. He texts his mother sometime during his lunch with Seonghwa, asks if there’s anything pressing or important for them to speak about, and then abstractly forgets about the whole thing when her reassurance is that, no, she just wanted to talk. 

At some point he responds to Junyoung’s comment, a vague affirmative without any expectation of having to follow through, and forgets about that too when he responds with enthusiastic thanks and the date he’ll be coming up - a number which San can’t quite bring himself to take the time to conceptualise right then, promises himself he’ll do so later, and then doesn’t. 

He’d played a few games with Yunho, and briefly joined a voice chat to have a round with Mingi and Yeosang. And by the end of it, waking up in the bare minutes before his alarm on the Monday, it almost feels as though it never happened.

He takes those spare minutes, the thin, watery light of morning leaking pale blue-white through his window, and twists onto his back to blink heavy eyes up at his ceiling, the pillow he’d woken up curled around still tucked to his chest. The same textural white paint stares back at him, paper-like shadows drawn across its surface. 

Paper-white, paper dolls, a shadow-play of sprites. It somehow makes him think of Plato’s cave, and then of some tragic piece of history he’d tucked away in his memory long ago. Gas stage lamps of cupped, flickering fires from back before they’d been lit up by the blinding heat-glare he’s so familiar with now. Long calf-length Romantic skirts flaring a little too close to the naked flame, and how quickly gauze and silk will burn. 

And if a member of the corps went up in flames, it would be a common enough occurrence that the audience wouldn’t bat an eye when she is quickly carried off stage while her sisters dance and dance, and the orchestra continues to play. 

Newspaper print dropped into a candle’s flame.

San never found out what tended to become of those women. Those who danced like moths to be burned alive and suffered the most excruciating torture in silence because they knew even then as San knows even now that ballet has no voice. 

A death on stage will always only ever be symbolic, and sometimes he feels like Icarus.

His phone vibrates harshly against the nightstand before chiming with his alarm and he lets it distract him from whatever half-dozing thoughts had wandered carelessly through his mind, sits up and kicks his legs out of bed before he can trick himself into swiping his alarm off to lay there for ‘two more minutes’, unplugs it and carries it with him out into the kitchen. 

There’s no-one there but the kettle is half-boiled, two cups set out, and San hears the creak of pipes and rush of water that can only be Seonghwa stepping into the shower. 

As familiar as ever with this routine he measures out he and Seonghwa’s coffees, half-accidentally overfills them when the kettle boils and bends down to sip at the lip of his cup from the bench before deeming it safe enough to carry back to his room without spilling. 

Dragging his bag from where he’s always taken to tossing it into the corner (despite Seonghwa installing a hook onto the back of his door for the exact purpose of giving him someplace to keep it) he folds in a spare shirt, a change of pants, checks that his beaten set of split-sole Blochs are tucked into the side pocket. The black elastic is turning dry and worn, long past needing to be fixed, but the rest of the shoe is sound so he digs through a drawer in his nightstand for a darning kit and tucks it into his bag on the off chance he might find time to sort them out. 

Leggings, a sports shirt and a sweater are what he tosses over his arm, slings the bag onto his shoulder to drop it by the door and takes his coffee up in his hand. 

He drops his clothes onto the couch and settles himself on the floor, downs a mouthful of coffee before setting it down within reach, settling in to stretch his legs and start to loosen his body from any lingering sleep while he waits for Seonghwa to finish in the shower.

He comes out to find San rolled forwards into a lazy split, his elbows on the floor and his coffee in one hand, scrolling through his phone on the other.

San grins up at Seonghwa, a towel over one bare shoulder and his damp hair pushed back.

“Good morning, James,” he greets, just this side of teasing, and laughs at the way Seonghwa tuts, turns away to pick up the coffee San had left him on the bench. 

“Not yet,” he half-scolds, his mellow voice warm with amusement and perhaps a touch of shy confidence. “It hasn’t been called.”

“As if it won’t be,” San scoffs, a quiet anticipation curling in his chest, tightening his breaths as he rolls up out of his stretch, phone and coffee still in his hands. “You were born for _La Sylphide.”_

“We’ll see,” is all Seonghwa says, embarrassed certainty in the smile he tries to stifle in the corner of his lips, and returns the tease with, “You’re up, Albrecht,” when he strides past towards his room to find a shirt, towelling at his hair without a backwards glance.

_Albrecht._

The excitement trembles through him, surges hot and cold in his blood. 

Today is the day he'll know for sure.

Today is the day they'll be given their roles, their auditions already assessed, and the schedules for the next two months of rehearsals laid out. 

_Albrecht._

It’s all he’s been working towards for the past gruelling months. 

And Seonghwa is right, it hasn’t been called. There’s no way to know for sure. 

But, god, does it feel good to hear it, and to let even some small conviction of the Director’s choice fill his lungs on the breath he draws in as he rises to his feet without bothering to empty his hands. 

_Albrecht._

* * *

There is a prescribed grammar to the way ballet is acted out, a governance of steps and gestures that craft every movement; organic rules more like a natural language than anything else which determines almost arbitrarily which foot San puts forward in fifth, whether the three points of his weight distribution will include his heel, the differential articulation of _pas de bourree_ that will carry him into a particular turn or jump.

Perhaps because it feels like language, in a sense - like thought and communication and words without a voice - San feels in a way he has difficulty explaining and perhaps even truly conceptualising as though his body and mind are perfectly synchronised in a way that little else has done for him. 

Even taekwondo, back when he’d learned. Back when his father had insisted that he needed self discipline and self control to help him focus at school but instead had given San something else for his ever-hungry attention to focus on. Even that, to San, had only been a matter of getting _good._ The movements were straightforward to learn and with practice and practice and practice San often found his mind would start to wander in the midst of completing sets, and if his father ever praised those sets it was a sentiment that left San feeling strange and discomforted.

He didn’t _like_ when no-one could seem to see that he hadn’t tried his best - he never had as a child, and he hates it even now. 

If he does something absentmindedly, even if he does it well, there is no amount of applause which could convince him to feel even a drop of satisfaction. 

But his father had been right. The self discipline and self control of learning taekwondo had, at the very least, taught him the valuable skill of pretending to pay attention.

There isn’t any moment when dancing, though, that he feels like that - where his mind can wander all too far from the movements he is performing. There are times when he will become too entrenched in execution and form to the exclusion of all else, but in the same way that barre will warm up the body and prepare it for the stage it is also a structure and performance which tethers San’s mind to his limbs, demands his focus and attention on nothing but the movements, the music, the linguistic articulation of each phrase he describes. 

This is the only place, the only state where he has ever felt truly and wholly himself. Alive in every way, and not just the ones that matter. 

But still, sometimes…

Sometimes he feels like Icarus.

Sometimes he feels so whole, so overwhelmed by his own freedom that he can’t help but wonder if this happiness is too much.

_You’re up, Albrecht._

This is what brings him back to himself at the end of the second class of the day.

The corps is running through _Swan Lake_ already in vague preparation for November, as though any of them could ever be afforded even a whole year to forget two hours of choreography they’d each rehearsed a hundred thousand times between the ages of first learning to dance and being put up on stage for their final assessments of pre-professional. 

He likes this, as much as it bores anyone else. The cosine waves of the calendar to him appear always to crest towards October for the gala, to November for _Swan Lake,_ to December for _The Nutcracker,_ dip into a week of bonuses and parties and reckless overindulgence for the New Year, and then rise again on the crest of _Sleeping Beauty_ or perhaps _Spartacus,_ the buzz of excitement for a touring company come March or May. 

“Choi San,” one of their senior teachers has stepped into the studio during their break three hours in, the corps chatting and sipping water, the familiar _thwack thwack thwack_ of ballerinas beating new pointe shoes into submission against the floor, some stretching out as they count apple slices and others rolling loose cigarettes so they won’t have to. 

Seonghwa raises his head - one of the few who rise to attention - and nudges San with his knee where he’s sitting on the floor by his feet with the elastic unpicked from his shoes struggling to thread a needle. 

He doesn’t need Seonghwa’s silent call to attention, the voice that calls his name curling into his ears and setting a shiver of momentary anxiety to shudder across his scalp with a near-uncomfortable intensity. 

He pierces the needle through the toe of his shoe, hurriedly drops it into the bag beside him and stands, suddenly too aware of the cooling sweat that sticks his shirt to his skin, dampens his too-long hair to cling to the nape of his neck. 

She glances at him, and then down at the clipboard in her hand. Gestures silently for him to follow her as she revokes the short step she’d taken into the studio, the heavy door swinging pendulant and slow behind her.

Sneakers shoved onto his feet and his unzipped bag hurriedly slung over his shoulder, the sudden churn of his thoughts doesn’t bother to remind him he ought to shoot Seonghwa even a thankful smile over his shoulder as he dashes out, catching the door before it swings fully closed. 

She’s waiting for him, if it can be called that. Glancing through the papers on her clipboard, letting them fall back into place from between her fingers when he rushes through a short bow, fixes the bag nervously on his shoulder. 

He knows he should greet her, but his voice can’t find its way to his throat. 

She doesn’t seem particularly bothered by it - gives a brisk smile which might have meant to be reassuring and gestures for him to walk with her. 

“The committee has reviewed your audition,” she says, her words subdued despite the chill, ringing voice which had called his name. Her kitten heels click against the linoleum floor and all San can think of as he nods, words stuck in his throat, is that though this woman is well into her forties, though her career as a soloist surely ended near a decade ago she still walks with the fluid grace of a dancer; though there are creases at the corners of her eyes she still blends eyeliner to draw attention to them; though it might have been years since she last went _en pointe_ she wears character heels with all the confidence of a Giselle who grew into a Myrtha. 

She glances at him from the corner of one subtly smoked-out eye, glances over the tense line of his body. 

“Relax,” she says, the firm tone he’s used to hearing from her in classes setting iron into her voice despite that her words don’t carry along the hall any further than to reach San’s ears. 

Habitual obedience to the command, he sets his shoulders low and raises his chin, breaths still tense and tight. 

“Mister Choi,” the quick-smooth pace of her steps doesn’t falter, “everyone on the committee had nothing but good things to say about your performance. Don’t think I don’t understand your nerves,” she adds, a crisp reassurance that manages to surprise San, shock some of the tension out of the set of his jaw, “but you of all people should know as well as anyone in this company to approach this meeting with confidence and rationality.” Another knife-sharp glance from the corner of her eye. “Do you understand.”

It isn’t written in her tone as a question, but it’s clear she wants an answer.

“Yes, ma’am,” San nods, struggling to force his spinning mind to cling onto her words. He isn’t sure how to gauge his success at that.

They pass a practice room’s open door, piano drifting out into the hall, and San resists the temptation to crane his neck to see if Yeosang is the one playing. 

“My advice,” she rounds a corner, stops abruptly before the director’s office and turns to look San directly in the eye for the first time. “Put aside your pride.”

This gives San pause, makes him tilt his head in question. “Ma’am…?” he says, half an acknowledgement and half a question.

“The only roles that _belonged_ to anyone were Armand and Marguerite,” she says, clean and strict, bordering on severe, “and those roles died with Nureyev and Fonteyn.” She doesn’t elaborate or explain, measuring him up with her eyes before turning to the door, knocking briefly before setting her hand on the latch. 

He gets it, he thinks.

He thinks.

He doesn’t quite, but he bows a nod to her anyway and lets her open the door all the same. Pretends he can’t feel hot wax dripping down his arms.

“Choi San, Sir,” his instructor introduces, and San bows properly to the Director, greets him formally. 

Heat prickles his skin, and his head is still spinning too dizzy to know that perhaps he should be afraid. He feels like Icarus, a panic of doubt surging sudden and almost uncontrollable in his chest as he feels himself rising up and up and up and thinks it’s too far, too far, too high, but he has no way to stop the climb.

There is hot wax dripping down his arms and his panicking mind can’t reach his body - a sudden disconnect, he can’t tell himself to be afraid. Can’t tell himself to _run._

“San,” the Director greets him, kind and familiar, and he feels himself smile that small polite, dimpled smile that makes him seem small and inoffensive. Too sweet, perhaps, to hurt. 

“Sir,” San returns, another slight bow.

“You’ve been soloist two years now, Mister Choi,” the Director says, his articulation reclining into formality and quite suddenly, quite suddenly, hot wax burning as it slips down his fingertips, San’s spinning mind seems to see everything as it will play out in the seconds before it does; the same way he is sure Icarus must have known, in feeling feathers slip from his skin, that he would fall, and fall, and fall.

_You auditioned for Albrecht._

“Your audition was for _Giselle,_ is that right?”

“That’s correct, Sir.” He can’t quite feel the words he speaks as he says them. He can’t quite feel his hands; only the slippery burn of wax wings scalding him.

_I’d love to give you the part._

“You have everything we could ever want to see in the principal role.”

“Thank you, Sir.”

_However,_

“But as we reviewed your performance, the committee and myself, we discussed our options.”

_You didn’t fit-_

“It seemed a waste to put someone as hardworking as yourself to a position which might not realise your potential.”

“Sir, I-”

“We’ve been offered a partnership with the New York City Ballet for this gala,” the Director interrupts him without missing a beat. Without hearing him, it seems.

San wonders if he’d even spoken at all, somewhere in the spinning torrent of his mind. Ocean waves crashing over his head. 

“Permission to perform excerpts from Balanchine’s _Apollo,_ under guidance of one of their choreographers.”

He’s flown too high, and now…

“Usually we’d consider a principal dancer for the role, but the board sees something else in your performance.”

Sometimes he feels like Icarus.

Numb composure closes over him, and he can’t feel through the numb panic that locks his body cold as he says, “I thought we were casting for the _Giselle_ showcase.”

“We were,” the Director says, resting his chin on folded hands, “but after reviewing your audition we decided your performance would be better suited here.”

“You won’t reconsider?”

God, who is he. Who is he to say this. What is he _saying?_ He should be silent. He should be polite, he should be thankful. He should be gracious and silent. 

He should let go of his pride.

_There isn’t a single role that belongs to any one living person._

“Choi San.” 

Something cold pierces through his gut and he feels lightheaded, he feels silent and turbulent and overwhelmed, tossed and turned beneath the ocean waves. His mind an echolalia of silence in the startling absence of any thought. It is neither hard nor soft, this feeling of nauseated suspension - neither stark in either black or white. 

It is simply blank, and it is with a polite mask of firm attentiveness carved like porcelain over his face that he pretends as though he can hear anything that is said after that. 

It’s only when a pause stretches with the indication that the Director expects an answer that San bows his head as effortlessly as he is able, finds his cotton mouth saying, “I understand, thank you for your consideration,” and feeling the words slip off his tongue with the same unsettling ease of an eel writhing out of his grasp. 

He finds himself walking down the hall, his paces steady and measured, and looks down at the printout he’s holding with purposeful care. The director must have instructed him to review the program, and San must have reassured that he would. He reads _La Bayadere, Act III: Entrance of the Kingdom of Shades,_ he reads _La Sylphide, Act II: PDD_ and _Symphonic Variations III,_ and then _Apollo: Terpsichore Variation, Apollo Variation II, PDD, Coda,_ and then as their closing piece, as their finale, _Giselle, Act II: PDD, Albrecht Variation._

The role he'd been so sure of. That he'd been all but assured by the seniors and artistic directors would _belong to him,_ and he…

What.

What did he do _wrong?_

Did he flunk the audition? Did he misremember the choreography and dance something completely different?

Why can't he remember?

He really genuinely thought he'd done _well._

He doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know what he can do. 

A nauseating phantom-ache is twisting and twisting in his gut, so intensely it _hurts,_ spreads cold-blooded dread through his leaden limbs and the disconcerting emptiness of his mind is being filled with a wool-static haze that blurs deep inside his ears, fills every inch of that hollowed expanse of his brain until he can’t breathe around it, this cold claustrophobia. 

A flash flood of storm-swollen ocean waves tearing through him and ripping him apart, closing over his head and wrenching him ruthlessly into the undertow of a panic he can’t control.

He doesn’t realise when his breaths pitched short and sharp but they are and he can’t stop them, doesn’t _want_ to stop them, because the realisation that crushes through with the force of a wind-torn wave slamming his body against the jagged rocks at the base of a cliff that he’d _fucked up_ somewhere, somehow, he’d fucked _up_ and he doesn’t know what to do.

He doesn’t know what he can do.

He can’t go back to class. He _can’t,_ even though that’s where Seonghwa is. He doesn’t know where Yeosang is. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t _know._

He doesn’t know what he’s doing, doesn’t know where he’s going. Tossed and turned dizzy and nauseous from the salt water in his lungs he doesn’t know what to _do_ and he finds himself forcing heavy breaths steadily from his nose at the bus stop he usually takes to get home and wonders if that is where the waves are carrying him.

And as he’s staring at the timetable trying desperately to understand it, to divine some meaning from it to find where it can take him to some safe harbour with his eyes still burning with the salt of ocean water and breaths still ragged and gasping, his phone rings somewhere in his bag.

More than half on instinct he fumbles to find it, barely feels the sharp prick of the needle still stuck in his beaten-up Blochs when he fishes it out, only bothers to stick the injury in his mouth when his phone won’t read his fingerprint.

Something in him is half-expecting the call to be from Seonghwa - by chance, or by some divine intuition of his that something is wrong and that San wants him nearby. 

He doesn’t think to look at the contact name that flashes up, states, “Hello?” into the receiver with his voice as perfectly steady as ever, and that crushes something in him. Breaks something in him. Makes him wonder, somehow, if any of the cataclysm of spiralling disaster that was plunging through him a bare moment ago was even real. 

Is any of that pain even that bad, if his voice doesn’t shake from it all?

 _“Hi, hyung,”_ an almost unfamiliar voice catches against his ear, small and meek and so full of excitement, and San is spinning, dizzy, doesn’t know a damn thing. _“I just finished my interview.”_

“I…” San fumbles, “what?” and pulls away briefly once, twice, before his phone recognises the gesture and the screen lights up, shows he’d answered a call from Junyoung.

Junyoung.

A hesitance on the other end of the line before he says, _“...I’m in Seoul today.”_ Unsure, suddenly, and San almost wants to scream, almost wants to put his fist through the stupid fucking bus timetable in front of him because he can’t be _small,_ he can’t be _lost,_ he can’t have a single fucking moment to not know _what the fuck he’s doing_ because the moment he does, the moment he does, there’s someone who’s relying on him to know what the _fuck he’s doing._

_“Did you still want to meet up?”_

“Oh,” he says into the phone, twisting around on his heel, dragging his fingers back through his hair, still damp with sweat. Cold, now. “Oh, that. That was today?” _What the fuck is he_ **_doing?_ **

_“If you’re busy it’s fine,”_ Junyoung tries to reassure, but he’s never been much good at that and a tone of nervous uncertainty has curled into his voice - enough to reach San on the other end. _“I’ll-”_

“No, I,” San interrupts, grips his fist in his hair and tries not to scream. Relishes the harsh, almost cruel tug of it. Forces the pain to ground him. Forces himself to swallow his sob, forces himself not to wonder how his crying eyes can suddenly be so dry. “I finished up early,” he half-lies.

He can’t go back. He knows that with a gross, chilling certainty. If he goes back he’ll scream. He’ll cry. 

He’ll break the second he sees Seonghwa’s face.

“Where are you?” he asks Junyoung. “I’ll come meet you.”


	4. giselle

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my update schedule is ,checks notes,,um it just says here 'I Do What i Want' ?? :/
> 
> cw panicking (cont.) but mostly just It's Been A Long Day vibes u kno ,nothing too intense u-u

Junyoung struggles to get him an address, clumsy and inexperienced with the city, and after hanging up San calls an Uber rather than mess around with catching a bus. He’s hanging by a thread, he can feel it, still. Head barely above water, he doesn’t think he can quite bring himself to bear the claustrophobia of the city crowds, doesn’t think the dull _beat-beat-beat_ of pain behind his eyes and the dizzying absence of thought in his mind will stand for him to stand in the aisle, hands shaking and hot-cold.

It’s only ten minutes or so before he arrives at the cafe Junyoung had described, and it doesn’t nearly feel long enough. 

He numbly thanks the driver as he steps out, and the chill curl of wind that greets him makes a shiver wrack through his body, makes him remember he hasn’t changed from the clothes he’d danced in, makes him hyperaware of the uncomfortable stick of sweat dried to his skin, dried in his hair and turning it salted and rough where it drags irritably against the nape of his neck.

Before he can look to the cafe to catch Junyoung’s eye he drops his bag on the sidewalk, crouches down to find where he’d thrown his sweater in after warming up. 

His finger throbs painfully and he ignores it, quickly pulling the sweater over his head in an arbitrary effort to perhaps hide the mess this day has made of him despite that he can still feel it clawing at his hollow insides, despite that he feels hoarse and empty and stretched thin, despite that he feels as though he is clinging desperately to a cliff’s edge after only barely fighting his way free of the churning waves that want to drag him in, screaming and drowning, and ragdoll him with their ferocity until he is _nothing._

It’s easy to spot Junyoung, despite how long it’s been since San has seen him. 

He’s still small, both in stature and the way he holds himself, and he still seems so much younger than the two years that separate them. He looks nervous and out of place, glancing between the phone in his hands and the high buildings that crowd them in, and San is forced to wonder if this is how San had looked when Seonghwa had first taken him in. 

Small and trying desperately not to seem scared. Country boy freckled and tan, sand still caught beneath his nails, lost in the cold lines and sharp edges of a steel-and-glass city. 

“Junyoung!” he calls and forces a smile that feels too natural, a wave to catch his attention. 

He wishes he didn’t hate the way Junyoung perks up to the sound of his voice, anxiety visibly settling into the same broad-embarrassed smile that San remembers from Namhae. A stab of fraught jealousy. 

He shoves it down.

He wishes there was someone, somewhere, whom the mere sight of could settle the desperate strangulation that’s coiled tight, tight, tight around his lungs like a hand is plunged into his chest and _gripping them_ and won’t let go.

He wishes there was someone who he could look to the way Junyoung looks towards him.

“Hyung!” Junyoung greets, his nerves making him too loud, too excited, and he surges out of the seat which he’d been looking as though he hoped it might swallow him mere moments ago.

It isn’t fair to Junyoung, San knows. It isn’t fair to him at all, but San can’t help the anxious stab of irritation that plunges through him. 

He keeps that smile on his face, dimpled and _nice,_ and holds his hand out to shake Junyoung’s.

His absent mind doesn’t expect Junyoung to surge forward into a hug, to have his chin thrown over San’s shoulder and his arms wound around his chest, but a scream is sitting in San’s throat and he nearly chokes on it, nearly falls back into the waves that want to tear him apart on the rocks with the way a shudder rips through his whole body, makes him want to tear his skin off to get it _out._

His hands immediately push to Junyoung’s shoulders, frantic rationale catching the instinct to shove him away only a bare moment before he does, reminding him to be gentle, to be soft, to be _nice._ But he can’t have Junyoung’s arms around him. He _can’t,_ the claustrophobia of it is curling around his throat and _strangling him_ and he can’t bear it, can’t stand it, and he’s gentle but insistent in the way he pushes Junyoung at arm’s length.

“Don’t touch me. Sorry,” he laughs, and it tumbles out of him nearly-messy, “I came straight from the studio. Still sweaty and gross.”

Junyoung, at least, seems abashed enough to nod, his smile subdued into something more calm despite the nervous excitement San can see bubbling inside him. “Have you eaten?” he asks, and San nods, lies _yes_ because nausea is still churning in the empty pit of his stomach and he doesn’t quite know how he got here, how this happened, but he doesn’t think he can quite bear to eat anything without breaking down. 

They sit, exchange small-talk greetings, and San orders a coffee that he won’t touch so as not to seem rude for the americano Junyoung is clutching between his nervous hands. His thin mask of friendly calm is the only thing keeping him from tumbling down the jagged precipice of his own mind. Fingernails scraped and bleeding from clinging on. A scream trapped in his tight throat.

Desperate to be more okay than he is.

“You haven’t changed much,” Junyoung says at some point - something in the barely-there relief in his voice that catches like a stone changing the course of the white-water river that has become of San’s mind.

He latches onto that, chest clenching and his stomach dropping, and he doesn’t quite know how to take it. 

He doesn’t think it’s true.

He thinks he’s changed plenty since back then, and he doesn’t know…why it almost feels like an insult, despite that Junyoung would never mean it like that.

Into the off-beat of San’s silence Junyoung keeps speaking, embarrassed words tumbling into the breadth of the space between them. “I’m surprised,” he says. “Even though this isn’t so far from home, it seems…” 

_Like a whole other world._

San knows.

Junyoung shrugs sheepishly, turns his cup in his hands. “I think I just…thought it might have changed you. But you’re still the same.” He seems so comforted in that, so reassured. A particularly savage wave crashes against the cliff below, teeth snatching at his heels. 

Something in him _hates_ this sentiment. Absolutely loathes it. 

But he won’t take the familiarity of his presence away from Junyoung, who needs that version of him now more than San needs to be himself. So he fits a smile onto his lips as though he’s honoured by the verdict, pleased to hear it, and plucks his fingernail over the lip of his cup. “Thanks.”

He looks down the precipice and there are waves at the bottom tearing white foam over jagged rocks.

He won’t survive if he falls down now, but even that thought makes his composure slip.

Is he that good an actor, or had he always been one wrong step away from screaming, all his life, before coming here to Seoul? Before silencing himself for ballet? Before finding a place to cry that isn’t the silence of his own head; in the place Seonghwa has made for him in his arms? Somewhere to feel reassured and cherished and safe where he can bask in the warmth of Yunho’s easy smiles?

Maybe as Junyoung sees him now, sees him barely clinging to his composure, he is more like the version of himself that he’d been before he’d left Namhae behind.

A flash of red catches his peripheral vision and San’s eyes, desperate to look at anything other than Junyoung, absently track its path. A man in a red jacket striding past, making for the crossing. Torn black jeans, headphones over a beanie. 

His stomach lurches, and then he tells it to settle. 

There are many red jackets in the world, and many men to wear them. The headphones hide an absence of piercings which might have told San to expect less, and he’s about to let his eyes drift away from the small crowd at the crossing before he sees the man shuffle a beat-up skateboard into his other hand, shucking back the cuff of his sleeve to glance at a watch. 

Even from the ten meters between them, San is pierced by the intensely passive stare of the eye inked onto the back of that hand and his stomach lurches again, desperately this time, and he doesn’t have it in him to not act.

“Sorry, I-” he’s half-standing out of his seat, barely glancing at Junyoung to reassure his surprise, “I think I know him- Woo!” he half-raises his voice, half-raises his hand. _“Wooyoung!”_

He’s standing up at their table calling out to the man at the crossing, and he thinks he might be going crazy, absolutely losing his mind until the man turns slightly for San to see his confused frown and quick eyes, the plush pout of his lower lip as he moves a headphone away from his piercing-studded ear.

And then he catches sight of San and his eyes light up like the surf reaching for the sun and he’s forgetting the crossing even as it turns green, bounding over with a thrilled yell and a skip in his step to drop his board by the table and swoop San up into a close hug and greet him with a firm kiss that barely misses his cheek, lands somewhere closer to his jaw and prickles a warm-cool tremble across his skin. 

One that makes him want to sink into the feeling, let it close over his head and consume him, because somehow it’s so _nice_ when it’s Wooyoung.

“Sannie, what are you doing here!” he demands, his voice loud and sweet with an unfaltering excitement like he is toffee still warm and half-set catching happily on the back of San’s throat. “You look so cute,” he adds when he steps back, his tattooed hands still on San’s shoulders as though he wants to pull him close again, a smile wide on his face as he looks him up and down. “Did you just come from work? I was going to Yunho’s,” he says, words tumbling out of him too quickly but San, somehow, has no difficulty keeping up, “wanna come?”

“Oh-” San stops short, glances over at Junyoung and loosens one hand from where he’s clutching Wooyoung’s jacket in a near white-knuckled grip. “I’m with-”

“It’s fine, you can come too. I’m Wooyoung!” he interrupts San’s hesitance with his quick eyes already on Junyoung, ruffling his fingers through San’s hair despite that it must look exactly how it feels - salty with dried sweat and inarguably gross - before draping that arm comfortably over San’s shoulder so he can turn to face the table.

Completely baffled, taken absolutely aback by the barrage of Wooyoung, he says “...Junyoung?” like a question.

San’s smile is natural this time, a laugh hidden behind it. He knows exactly the alarming causality of meeting Wooyoung.

Wooyoung’s arm stays draped comfortably over San’s shoulder while he leans one hand on the table, the other unconsciously overfamiliar folded over the nape of San’s neck - no doubt equally as gross as his hair. “Junyoung, huh? Junyoung,” he repeats, and nods as though to emphasise that he’s got the name lodged neatly in his memory now. “Do you dance?”

“Oh,” he fumbles, “uh. Not… so much, no.” eyes darting quickly between San and Wooyoung, and it takes San a moment to realise he’s looking at the way Wooyoung is touching him, his hand closed lazily around the back of San’s neck as though holding him, owning him, an unconsciously possessive mark, and something warm and uncomfortable for how much it thrills him falls through the pit of San’s stomach, heat itching in his palms.

Wooyoung waves off the hesitation in Junyoung’s voice, in his posture, in the way he’s once more turned small and nervous. “That’s fine,” he says, airy and effortless reassurance, “we won’t be doing much today anyway. And Yunho’s there, and I think Mingi’s finally run out of ways to avoid Hongjoong’s deadlines, so they’re probably recording now too.” 

He wants to do something. He wants to do something that he never would have before, back in Namhae. He wants to do something that Junyoung wouldn’t recognise him for, that he won’t be able to look at San and say _you haven’t changed a bit_ as though he were truly blind to all the changes that have metamorphosed him into someone he doesn’t resent being.

He looks at Wooyoung, the sun-kissed curve of his cheek as he grins and the strain of excitement in his neck that San, effortlessly and absurdly, realises that he would quite like to lay his lips against. He allows himself to smile, eyes soft and warm, and it isn’t forced. It’s _lovely._

It’s so easy to place a hand at the small of Wooyoung’s back and allow all those rabid waters from below to rise up, now excitable and warm. To swell and fill him and catch him from where he’d been clinging to that edge, buoyed on a helpless joy for seeing Wooyoung, and seeing his smile, and hearing his laughter, and being liked by him enough to be invited wherever it is he’s going. 

“I’d like it,” San says and Wooyoung cheers, squeezes warm and affectionate around the back of San’s neck. “It’s not far from here,” he averts his eyes from the bright thrill of watching Wooyoung to address Junyoung, and doesn’t bother to move the smile from his face or his hand from the small of Wooyoung’s back. 

He doesn’t miss the way Wooyoung shifts closer, grazes his thumb across the back of San’s neck, beneath his hair, before brushing his hand past to drape his arm fully around San’s shoulders.

“Should we go now?” he asks, and Wooyoung shrugs against him. 

“It’s my class,” he says, “so probably, yeah. But it’s not like they can start without me. I’ll steal a sip of coffee though,” he adds, already reaching out to pluck San’s cup from the table and downing much more than a sip before San can react.

He digs his elbow into Wooyoung’s side and snatches the cup from his lips despite the way Wooyoung’s plush mouth chases after it and he doesn’t know if it’s more for his presence reassuring the anxious nausea that had been threatening to overthrow him or simply that his lips are now printed against the ceramic of the mug, but San _wants_ this coffee.

He’s always been a bit stupid for corny shit like that, and Wooyoung is pretty and affectionate and nice and they’ve only met all of three times now but San likes the way he greets unexpected friends with an enthusiastic cheer and a warm kiss on the cheek, likes his exuberance and his laughter, likes the tactile immediacy of his friendship, and San can’t help but think it’s so _nice_ to know someone as recklessly kind as Wooyoung.

“It’s your class,” he says in lieu of anything else, setting the cup back on the table without drinking from it. “You can’t be late.”

“I thought you said you’d always take my side,” Wooyoung challenges, half-whines as San dips to pick up his bag and Wooyoung’s board. The sandpaper grit of the grip tape catches on the pads of his fingers and he hopes the length of his hair will hide the flush of his neck from Junyoung’s searching eyes. 

“This is me, taking your side,” he rolls his eyes instead, nudging Wooyoung along with his shoulder and shooting an encouraging, half-abashed grin over to Junyoung. “Unless you want Yunho to fire you?” he digs, half-hoping that whatever he’s managed to understand through Wooyoung’s vague complaints and the bare crumbs Seonghwa had given him that Wooyoung does in fact teach at the studio.

“Yunho wouldn’t fire me,” he says, “I’m far too cute.” Effortlessly confident in that certainty as he takes both their elbows in his tattooed hands to bodily steer them away from the table towards the crossing, Junyoung scrambling to catch his bag and San helpless but to laugh for the wind-tossed thrill of being whisked away by Jung Wooyoung.

He pretends too that he doesn’t notice the way Wooyoung drops his hand from Junyoung’s arm once they’ve crossed the road only to loop his closely with San’s, a lightness in his step and a smile quick on his lips while he chatters away to Junyoung’s overwhelmed answers about who he is, where he’s from, what he’s doing in Seoul, has he visited anywhere yet? Is he staying here long? Oh, just a day-trip? But there’s so much to do, even he can hardly find the time! Well when you get the job you’ll be coming back, and you’ll have all the time in the world. He'll have friends here at least, considering Junyoung knows San and San knows Wooyoung, and Wooyoung knows Seoul inside out.

He’s so quick to be friendly, so quick to make a friend, San considers as he chimes in here and there, filling the silence between Wooyoung’s words with a similar momentum. Somehow he feels buoyed with pride for the way Wooyoung is. Thrilled for the opportunity, perhaps, to show off how good of a friend he has. 

Because while Wooyoung and San might not be _good friends_ yet - operatively, _yet,_ because San feels certain now with this that the same way he couldn’t quite bear the thought of Wooyoung only ever being a stranger to him, now the thought of them being mere acquaintances is distasteful enough that he slips his hand down Wooyoung’s arm and catches his hand instead. 

That is to say they might not yet be good friends but Wooyoung is inarguably, irrefutably _a good friend,_ and he’s showing the best side of his charm to Junyoung, so of course San can’t help but be pleased. 

Wooyoung steers them unflinchingly through what might have been shortcuts, carving through a path of half-empty parking lots and the broad alleys between buildings, crossing roads with lazy steps and keen eyes darting back and forth to watch for a break in the traffic that would let him lead them across comfortably, still managing to keep up a light stream of conversation the whole while.

It isn’t a route San ever would have thought to take, but in half the time he’d expected he blinks once, and then twice, and then the broad building in front of him coalesces into the shape of Yunho’s studio, unfamiliar for a moment from the obscure angle they’d approached it. 

Wooyoung skips ahead, and all this time his hand has not slipped from San’s and now, still, he makes no move to drop it rather than use it as a means to pull San along, rounding a corner to the door spilling music out onto the street while San glances over his shoulder to wave Junyoung to follow. 

The smile that is splitting his face, he realises to the burst of sound the greets them, has long since become less something of a proof he can show to Junyoung and more a natural response to being back here, the pleasure of Wooyoung’s company even as he finally drops San’s hand to run across the room and throw himself bodily against Mingi’s unsuspecting back with a loud whoop, arms thrown around him in an inescapable embrace. 

Mingi barks out a startled sound and stumbles against the force of it, much to Wooyoung’s vocal victory, and the absolute _sound_ of him must alert Hongjoong, who blinks up from his computer at the table to stretch his back out of his slouch, hands curled slightly by his cheeks before he rolls his eyes in a gesture of helpless affection and rubs at them with the backs of his hands, slumping back down with a defeated sort of expectation.

It’s warranted when Wooyoung leans over the back of the couch to tangle him in a hug, one leg slung over onto headrest and the other hanging halfway to the floor. 

“This is Mingi,” San points out where he’s contemplating throwing his only pen at the back of Wooyoung’s head, “and Hongjoong,” he gestures in the vague direction of where Hongjoong would have been, if he hadn’t already been entirely consumed by the Eldritch hunger of Wooyoung’s affection. “And Yunho is…” he glances around towards the broad stage, wondering if he could point the teacher out to Junyoung only to find he’s thoroughly mingled himself amongst his students, enthusiastically performing the choreography alongside them, so instead he settles to say, “the tall one,” and hopes Junyoung understands.

 _“Ow!”_ Wooyoung’s yelp crashes through the room, _“Ouch, ah!_ NooOOOO _stop stop stop ow ow ow please stop!”_

Whatever initial (and decidedly momentary) surge of alarm that had whipped San’s head around to see is immediately swept beneath the roll of his eyes when he sees Hongjoong with his teeth sunk into Wooyoung’s arm over his jacket, glaring ruthlessly up at him while Wooyoung’s free hand pushes against his bleach-blond head as though desperate to shove him away but too afraid to use any force.

Hongjoong only lets up when Wooyoung manages to screech out a desperate, _“I’m sorry!”_ over the music of Yunho’s class, and Mingi seems pleasantly appeased by this punishment enough that he doesn’t have any need to waste his only pen as a targeted projectile.

“I brought Sannie,” Wooyoung whines, kicking away from Hongjoong and pulling his sleeve up to assess the damage.

He knows he should have expected it, but this is the first time he’s seen the way the tattoos coil up Wooyoung’s tanned forearm, almost writhing across his skin, the snake's scales each perfectly placed so as to almost seem real.

“San?” Hongjoong turns to hook his chin over the back of the seat, blinking placidly up at him as though he hadn’t just bitten Wooyoung hard enough to bruise. “Have you messaged Seonghwa?”

Something drops through his stomach and his eyes widen, realisation crashing through him. “Oh my god,” he mumbles, dropping Wooyoung’s board and his bag to the floor and patting for the pockets his leggings don’t have before digging quickly through his bag once more, narrowly avoiding piercing his finger on the same needle again.

“He called after his meeting,” Hongjoong says, watching him fumble for his phone and see three texts and a missed call from Seonghwa he hadn’t heard come through. “Said he was worried when you didn’t come back.”

Hongjoong speaks plainly and unconcerned, but if San knows Seonghwa then he knows that Hongjoong is largely downplaying the quiet panic that would have filled him when San didn’t come back to class, and didn’t text to say where he was or what he was doing or even if he was okay. 

Hongjoong is watching him even as San makes the call, still crouched on the floor by his bag, and part of him registers that Wooyoung has taken Hongjoong’s laptop and Junyoung’s arm and is setting them both down on the opposite couch, busily talking to Junyoung about _something,_ and San looks nervously at his fingers as the phone rings against his ear, bites at a hangnail until the phone picks up.

_“Sannie?”_

“Hwa!” he bursts out, wrenching his fingertip from his mouth and he can feel his eyes already burning with the tears he’d thought he’d left behind but even though Hongjoong is still watching him he knows where he’s crouched behind the lounge his expression is hidden from Junyoung and Wooyoung, and Mingi too, and somehow with only Hongjoong looking on silently he is able to feel his face crumble into an immediate and sudden desperation; newspaper print clenched in a fist. 

“I’m so sorry,” he tumbles out before Seonghwa can say a word, his voice quiet beneath the heavy music and his breath catching in his throat, and Seonghwa can hear him and Hongjoong is watching him but somehow he doesn’t feel as though he can hide before them, even when his rushed words slip into dialect he hates speaking in Seoul, even to Seonghwa. “I didn’t get- I got cast for something else and I didn’t know what to do and I just,” he sucks in a sharp breath, “felt really scared and I didn’t really know what I was doing or anything and then Junyoung called and he’s in the city and I forgot I said I was gonna meet him today and,” another too-short breath, “I couldn’t think or anything I just-”

 _“San,”_ Seonghwa interrupts him, firm and kind, his muffled voice even softer through the phone, _“San-ah, it’s okay. It’s okay, I’m not mad. I was just worried. Okay?”_ he repeats. _“It’s okay.”_

San forces himself to breathe deeply, a trembling inhale he’s sure Seonghwa can hear, and nods against the phone. He feels a tear slip down the side of his nose and he hurriedly dashes it away with the back of his wrist, breathes again and tries not to cry. 

_“Are you alright?”_

“Yeah,” San tries to say, and for the first time all day his voice wavers, and it makes another tear fall unbidden and he’s quick to wipe that away too, lest anyone other than Hongjoong see. “Yeah, I’m okay,” he tries again, and he _wants_ to sound fine, he wants to sound alright, but there is some small, wretched part of him that can’t help but thrill for the fact that while he can’t even figure out how to lower his mask for others, at least there is someone for whom he can’t seem to find it at all. 

_“Where are you now?”_

“I’m at Yunho’s,” he mumbles, rubbing at his eye like a child and then pulling away when he realises that will make them red and swollen and so obvious that he’s been crying. “Hongjoong is with me.”

 _“Good,”_ Seonghwa sighs into the phone, a steady breath of relief, _“good. Let him take care of you. I’ll be there soon.”_

“You don’t have to,” San tries to object, but he can all but feel Seonghwa shaking his head.

 _“I’ll finish up here,”_ he reassures, _“and I’ll speak to the instructor for you. Stay with Hongjoong,”_ he says, as though he trusts Hongjoong effortlessly and unwaveringly with the safekeeping of one of his most treasured people. _“I’ll be there in about an hour. Okay?”_

He bites at his lip, nods helplessly against the phone once more, not quite able to stop the tears that keep dripping silently down his nose. “Okay,” he says against the receiver, his voice insufferably small, and he can hear Seonghwa’s hesitation to hang up and leave him alone.

 _“I love you,”_ he says at last. _“We’ve got you, Sannie. It’s alright.”_

“I know,” he says, just as small as before. “I love you too.” And then Seonghwa is gone, the line dead against San’s ear.

Phone slipping from his ear, San drops his face against his knees, draws in a shuddering breath and curses quietly. Tries desperately to find some sort of composure when Hongjoong says, “Here,” with his voice plain and unaffected, and San glances up to find him holding a small pack of tissues over the back of the chair.

There are bracelets glinting on his wrist, and the nail of his ring finger this time is painted a matte black, a silver line drawn clean through it. 

When San takes the tissues with a muffled thanks Hongjoong twists further in his seat, folds his arms over the back of the chair and rests his small chin atop them. The way he watches San is strange. Impassive, as though contemplating still whether he should be considerate or stern. Evaluating just how much San is hurting right now, almost clinically. 

“Dab, don’t wipe,” he says at last. “You’ll make your face red.”

San breathes a wet, uneven laugh into one of the tissues and nods, following his direction as well as he can. 

“You don’t strike me as irresponsible, San,” Hongjoong says after another stretch of music-filled silence. “What happened?”

San knows, somehow, that Hongjoong isn’t asking him to relay back the messy sequence of events that have led him here. He breathes deeply, forcing his mask of calm back into place piece by shattered piece. “I had,” he starts, and then stops, feels his voice wavering again. He clears his throat, rearranges his breaths. Crushes the tissue into the palm of his hand. “I think I had a panic attack,” he says, and his voice is steady but to maintain that he has to keep it small. “I think I...lost time and, didn’t really know what was happening.”

Hongjoong tilts his head on his arms, doesn’t ask why San had seemed so fine walking in. It almost seems as though he doesn’t _need_ to ask. Like he looks at San and sees everything including the mask and what’s underneath; as though he has a feather in one hand, and San’s heart in the other, and is trying to decide if he’s done wrong by Seonghwa or if he’s simply too fucked up to do right by him.

“Are you anxious?” he asks, and San shakes his head. He’s reserved at times, even shy, but he isn’t _anxious._ He isn’t prone to this sort of thing, though he knows it’s happened before. Something clears in Hongjoong’s expression and he states like it’s a question, “It didn’t go the way you thought.”

“Yeah,” San laughs, breathless and a little choked. “It’s stupid-”

“I get it,” Hongjoong says, still in that same tone of kind ambivalence that manages to make San feel somehow seen without pity. “It’s fine now?”

San pauses, tries to find his voice to say what he’s most afraid of. “I know he won’t be,” he manages, even quieter than before, barely above a whisper, and hates that he feels his lip tremble around it but can’t do anything to help it, “but I was scared he’d be angry.”

“He was scared too,” Hongjoong says plainly, and doesn’t comment when San unscrunches the tissue from his fist and presses it firmly to his eyes to stop the tears he can feel drawing up once more. “Call him next time,” he commands, effortlessly calm. “First thing you do. He wants to know.”

San nods into his hands, draws in a shuddering breath. “I know,” he says, and his voice feels firmer. “I know. I will.”

“Good,” Hongjoong assures, unshakable and patient, and when San lifts his head from his hands once more he smiles, just a little, and a foreign warmth plunges through him at the sight of it, fills every part of his body to his fingertips. “Better?”

San nods, and breathes another helpless, almost-shakey laugh. “Yeah,” he admits, and realises he isn’t afraid anymore of how Hongjoong will measure the worth of his stupid, fragile heart. “Thank you.”

He shrugs without really shifting his posture, stretches out his hand once more and waves his fingers until San reaches up to take it, lets himself be pulled to his feet.

“You’re fine,” Hongjoong says, still with that small smile full of immeasurable warmth. “You don’t look like you cried.”

“Thank you,” San says again, and his voice almost wavers. 

Hongjoong shrugs again, kindly, and doesn’t tell him not to bother. “Talk to him when he gets here.”

“I will,” San promises, and Hongjoong nods, squeezes his fingers gently before letting him go.

“I’m gonna close my eyes for a bit,” he says, voice pitched a little louder as though now he’s not only speaking to San. “Let me know when Wooyoung’s done messing with my stuff.”

San smiles, and it doesn’t feel as though he’s hung from a precipice anymore. The waters are at his feet now, lapping gently, and the sand is soft between his toes. “Sure thing, hyung.”

Hongjoong’s eyes widen for a moment, almost surprised, and then crease into a pleased smile. “Thanks, Sannie,” he says and it’s the first time, he realises, that Hongjoong has called him that.

A smile still tugging at his mouth, San drops the tissues into his bag and rounds the couch as Hongjoong slumps back with a weary groan to lie haphazardly across it, arms flung up by his head, and the bags beneath his eyes are just a little more pronounced when they’re closed. San is forced to wonder if the only time he gets sleep is when Wooyoung interferes with his work, and if that’s the case then determines to keep Wooyoung as busy with his interference as possible.

“Did you take your files off Hongjoong’s computer?” he taunts as he circles round the back of the couch Wooyoung and Junyoung are sitting, propping his elbows on the back and peering between their heads.

“He threatened to delete them,” Wooyoung scoffs with a roll of his eyes, “so I went and bought him a new hard drive to put it on.”

“What are you doing?” he asks, leaning closer over their shoulders to see the pictures they’re more or less alternating between clicking through, the computer balanced on one of Wooyoung’s knees and angled so they both have a view.

“I’m forcing Junyoung to show me his portfolio,” Wooyoung says, at least honest with his methods, if unapologetic with his pleased smile. “I’m gonna give feedback for the small price of him calling me hyung.”

“Don’t call him hyung,” San is quick to counter for Junyoung’s benefit. “I don’t think he’d ever get over himself.”

Junyoung glances nervously, almost guiltily at him, and Wooyoung bursts out a thrilled laugh.

“Too late,” he mocks, and San smacks away the finger Wooyoung pokes in his face. “And not only that, but I’m officially his _favourite_ hyung, so eat shit Sannie.”

San rolls his eyes and wonders if this is exactly how Seonghwa had felt the first time San and Wooyoung had been formally introduced. “As if,” he snorts, roughing his hand through Wooyoung’s hair, still unbearably fond for him. “What qualifications do you even have?”

 _“Uhh,”_ Wooyoung mocks as though San’s being stupid, “I’m a videographer? Junyoungie presented his portfolio today so I thought I’d be generous and help out.”

“Oh?” San teases in return, shoving him gently enough that he won’t endanger the precarious balance of Hongjoong’s laptop on his knee. “What do you videograph, _Wooyoungie?”_

 _“Wait!”_ Wooyoung interrupts their argument to a picture that Junyoung had tried to flick past, scrolls back despite Junyoung’s reluctance for him to see it and pulls the computer closer to himself so he can look properly.

“You don’t have to-” Junyoung tries to insist, but Wooyoung quickly shushes him, eyes darting over the image.

“This one’s really good, Jun,” he says, and San might have agreed but… 

He recognises the pier, waterlogged and sand-swept. He probably wouldn’t have recognised the anonymity of the back that’s turned to the camera but he recognises the dusted bleach-blond of his own hair, the wearied, exhausted bunch of his shoulders with his head dipped down between them.

It’s a beautiful photograph - the pier’s crumbling lines drawn towards the crisp depths of the ocean, leading the eye to San’s defeated form, centred, the sun hanging low over him as though its weight is what is crushing him down. 

It feels strange to be reminded of that day, and of how much he’d been hurting, through a photograph that frames it so prettily. 

He’d cried that day, San recalls, the realisation almost surprising him. After the stranger with the red hair had left San to wonder what he cared about most, what he wanted from his life, for a brief moment he’d let himself crumple and break beneath the crushing weight of _not knowing._

He’d bitten his trembling lip so hard it hurt, eyes blurred and glassed over completely with the weight of fat, heavy tears that had dropped unceremoniously into the dehydrated wood of the pier - and he remembers, quite suddenly, how mockingly he'd almost laughed for the way they hadn't even reached the ocean. 

He didn’t know anyone else had been there.

He didn’t know anyone had seen him. 

And a week later, hair freshly dyed black, he’d left.

“I’m sorry.” 

Quiet, anxious. As though scared even to have his apology be heard. 

San tears his eyes away from the screen, glances at where Junyoung has sunk deep and small into his chair as though hoping he might disappear. San can’t quite meet his wide, near-pleading eyes, despite the way Junyoung looks at him as though he’s begging for reassurance, for San to tell him it’s okay. 

“What for?” he says, no breath of turmoil in his voice, eyes grazing somewhere past Junyoung’s soft cheek. “It’s a good photo.”

“That’s _you?”_ Wooyoung demands, scrolling to zoom in on the photo, pausing with the mouse hovering over where the quality had caught the paint-splatter of freckles that dust the right side of his neck. 

It doesn’t occur to him to wonder that Wooyoung might have noticed them enough to recognise him by them.

San offers a crisp smile, an affirmative hum, not looking at either of them or quite at the screen. “Just before I left, right?” he says, and hopes there is enough levity in his voice to hide the uncomfortable churn of re-realised emotion. 

“Why did you look so sad, Sannie?” Wooyoung pries, leaning his cheek against San’s shoulder while he smoothly scrolls back out, keeps clicking through Junyoung’s portfolio without missing another beat.

_I didn’t know if I had anything worth living for._

He doesn’t say that. The words are too heavy for the person he is now, despite that he’d felt as though he was holding the weight of the whole sky upon his shoulders back then without knowing if anything would really change if he simply let it fall.

“I was leaving my hometown,” he says instead, a tight smile on his lips and the near-tense huff of a laugh forced past his lips. “Of course I was sad.”

And even though this day has been awful, absolutely wretched in the way it keeps poking and prodding every time he regains his composure as though to see what it might take to make him really properly _break,_ he remembers how he'd felt back then. He remembers how he'd felt that day. And it was infinitely worse.

He's satisfied, he finds, even on a day as stupid as this, with the person he's become.


	5. hilarion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello friens we r back to irregular updates but we are Also back to long chapters im sorry for both of those things my brain is wonky have some <3 food <3
> 
> cw brief intrusive thoughts (physical violence/blood), i think thats all for this one

San lasts maybe half an hour between Yunho’s class ending and Wooyoung switching in to teach his own before the long tide-pull drag of exhaustion catches him. 

It’s been a seemingly endless day, fraught with emotional landmines of varying intensity, and it’s like he keeps hitting every single one of them, but with Wooyoung too busy doing his actual real life job to keep Junyoung company and Hongjoong still passed out and snoring gently on the longer couch from where San hadn’t had the heart to wake him up like he’d asked, he doesn’t really have any option but to keep a smile on his face against the riptide pull of a tiredness that is rapidly encroaching his mood towards the temper tantrum of an overtired toddler. 

He _tries._ He really does. He reassures the ease of comfort Wooyoung drew out of Junyoung and encourages him to talk, asks questions about Namhae and lets his answers ramble as long as possible, listens only close enough to figure out the next question to ask so he can keep Junyoung talking. Talking so that San doesn’t have to. 

He really doesn’t think he has it in him to hold a real conversation right now, and he feels wretchedly guilty for pretending he isn’t watching the minutes tick by because Junyoung deserves more from him, more of him, and San can barely even offer the bare minimum, but frankly the only thing keeping him going is Seonghwa’s promise to be there in an hour.

He makes it in forty-something minutes.

San watches him come in, ruthlessly kicks the shit out of himself when he hears Junyoung notice his inattention and peter off in the middle of a story to turn and see who’s stolen San’s focus from him this time, but he’s so tired that he thinks he might start crying again just from that alone, and Seonghwa’s half-hurried steps across the studio right towards him aren’t quite quick enough for San’s liking.

For either of their liking, it seems, in the way he stretches out his arms to catch Seonghwa’s waist and Seonghwa’s hand immediately goes to his hair, fingers carding through the strands still mucky from old sweat even despite his reluctance for filth. 

He holds San’s head against him and San takes his wordless permission to bury his face against Seonghwa’s stomach, arms winding fully around his waist as he stands next to the lounge. 

“You must be Junyoung,” he hears Seonghwa say, one hand already rubbing small circles on San’s back between his shoulders and the other, he knows, will be extended to Junyoung for a polite handshake. “I’m Seonghwa, San’s roommate,” he says, more of an introduction than anyone else has given, and his voice is so kind and gentle and soft that San presses his face closer against him so that Junyoung won’t see the way his expression trembles just to hear his voice.

“Oh,” Junyoung says, “yeah.” He sounds breathless, just a little, but San isn’t particularly concerned. It’s the effect Seonghwa has on people, he knows. 

He absolutely knows.

Seonghwa rubs his hand up and down San’s back once, twice, and then asks, his voice even more gentle, even more soft, “You okay, Sannie?”

He nods his head against Seonghwa’s stomach for Junyoung’s benefit, but tightens his arms around his waist for Seonghwa’s. 

“Okay,” Seonghwa cards his fingers through San’s hair once more, understanding him, no doubt offering Junyoung one of those tight smiles of his that are meant to be reassuring - and are, once you know Seonghwa, and know that despite the accidental insincerity of his expressions they are never, _ever_ anything but genuine. “I’m sorry I took so long,” he says, this time for San, his blunt fingernails scratching gently across San’s back over his sweater. 

“You’re early,” he corrects, muffled into the fleece of Seonghwa’s jacket, and turns his head a little so he can breathe after weighing the importance of air against the risk of Junyoung seeing his face.

“Still,” is all Seonghwa insists, and then pats San’s arm in silent reassurance as he shifts, moves to slide himself onto the short couch beside San without ever asking him to let go. San doesn’t untuck his face from Seonghwa’s stomach either, and ends up half-curled onto his lap, Seonghwa’s arm draped over him and patting a soft tempo against his side. 

He finds he doesn’t really give a shit what Junyoung is thinking, right now. He’s suddenly so beyond exhausted that even the small act of lying almost-horizontal with Seonghwa cuddled against him is almost enough to make a pained whimper slip past his lips.

“You wanna talk?” Seonghwa offers gently, kindly, quietly enough that Junyoung might not hear - quiet enough to give San the chance to pretend he hasn’t. 

He entertains the thought, briefly. But then he cracks open an eye and sees Hongjoong lying on the other couch. He hasn’t moved, really, but his head is turned towards them, and he isn’t asleep. He’s watching San, carefully. Shrewdly, almost, and San remembers what he promised him.

Hongjoong’s eyes fall closed again, and San isn’t sure if he’s pretending to be asleep or if he’s simply still tired. 

He has no doubt, though, that Hongjoong is listening. 

It almost feels like he imagined it.

He knows he didn’t.

He parts his lips, wonders if he can find the words. 

“Are you okay, hyung?” he hears Junyoung ask. Small, almost timid. Someone who is concerned, but hasn’t really had a whole lot of practice at it.

Quite suddenly, he’s sick of pretending to be fine. He’s sick of scrambling and fumbling for composure when it always feels just slightly out of reach.

He can’t figure out how to let himself cry while watched by eyes that aren’t Seonghwa’s or, it seems, Hongjoong’s, but that isn’t what he wants. He doesn’t want to cry anymore. He just wants to _talk._

He just wants to tell someone about his shitty stupid day, and he doesn’t care if Junyoung sees him tired and upset. He just wants to tell someone.

He draws in a deep breath through his parted lips, eyes on Hongjoong’s exhausted, restful face, and says, “I got cast for _Apollo.”_

Seonghwa’s hand stills against him, and San can’t describe how he feels the shock roll subtly through his body held tight in San’s arms.

He doesn’t say _That’s great, Sannie!_ He knows San well enough to know there’s something wrong, that he’s upset, that there’s nothing _great_ about this. “Not Albrecht?” he asks, and that’s exactly it, that’s _exactly it,_ and it’s so stupid that San has to visualise punching himself in his own stupid face over and over until there’s blood all over his nose and mouth and hands to stop from doing something even stupider in real life, like kicking his legs and hitting pillows like a child throwing a stupid tantrum.

Still, the sharp visual of the thought and the way he can almost feel what it would feel like to feel his nose breaking under his fist makes him nauseous. 

“What did they say?” Seonghwa asks into his silence.

He huffs out a breath, forced and frustrated and pissed, and unwinds his arms from Seonghwa’s waist so he can twist and turn onto his back, his head still resting on his lap. “Something stupid,” he mutters, a sharp anger burning quickly through him that he doesn’t want to feel, ripping through him like a hot knife stabbed just beneath his sternum. “They were casting for _Giselle_ and then something about NYCB and he said how I’ve been soloist for two years and then,” he gestures vaguely, angrily, and forces the strength out of his arms to make them drop uselessly to his chest. _“Apollo,”_ he finishes, and it comes out less bitter than he’d thought. More defeated than he’d wanted.

Seonghwa’s hand slips beneath one of his, twines his fingers with San’s and gives them a reassuring squeeze. It’s like the gesture evaporates the bristling, burning anger from San’s whole body, like venom drawn from a wound, and he’s left heavy and tired and sad all over again. 

“It’s a principal role, San,” he says, and San squeezes his eyes closed, folds his other arm over his face.

“I know,” he mutters.

“I know you were set on _Giselle,”_ he says, one hand squeezing San’s reassuringly and the other carding gently through his hair, “and I know it took you by surprise, and it’s okay that you’re upset, but it’s a good thing,” he reminds. 

“It’s _Balanchine,”_ he retorts, scrunching his nose in distaste.

He feels a quiet, stifled laugh shake through Seonghwa, and is reluctant to admit to himself that it does make him feel better. “Don’t let anyone hear you say that,” Seonghwa pretends to scold, lightly flicking San’s forehead before smoothing over it with the palm of his hand, dragging his fingers back through San’s gross hair once more. “Did they say anything else?”

San shrugs, pulls his arm away from his eyes so he can play with where Seonghwa’s fingers are tangled around his. “Some NYCB choreographer,” he says, and shrugs again, doesn’t bother to fix his expression when he feels it slump into a pout. “I don’t know,” he admits, eyes focused only on where he’s pushing and pulling at Seonghwa’s intentionally limp fingers, flexing each of the digits. “I forgot.”

“Well,” Seonghwa reassures, patient and calm and so much like Hongjoong that San hazards a glance over to find him curled onto his side, head cushioned on his arm, watching their conversation unfold, “they’re going to email our schedules at five o’clock, so there’s that. I’ll help you look over it,” he says, squeezing his fingers around San’s again, “and we can plan out the rehearsal period. Sound good?”

San angles his head to look up at Seonghwa, still pouting, but nods despite his exhausted reluctance.

Seonghwa smiles down at him, reads it all in his face. “I’ll let you nap first,” he bounces his leg gently to jostle San’s head, softly tease him for his pouting without using words, “and then we’ll get into it.” He glances at San’s hands, both tucked around his, and a frown flickers across his brow. “What happened to your finger?” he asks, unfolding his hand from San’s hold to pick it up and bring it closer to his face, inspect the tiny, angry red pinprick and the crusted trickle of dried blood that San hadn’t noticed had run down and pooled in the dip between his fingers.

“Oh,” he blinks at it, lets Seonghwa look. “I got my finger on the darning needle.”

“It looks deep, San,” he scolds, more concerned than anything. “Why didn’t you clean it?”

He shrugs again, smaller. Doesn’t really look at anything at all when he lowers his eyes and admits quietly, “I forgot.”

“Yun,” Seonghwa calls out, still gentle, still calm. “Can you go get the first aid kit?”

“It’s not that bad,” San tries to retort, but is silenced beneath Seonghwa’s quelling look. Instead he sighs and reluctantly pushes himself up from Seonghwa’s lap, curls his knees against his chest and loops his arms around them, some of his weight still inclined against Seonghwa’s shoulder. 

“I’m sorry, hyung,” Junyoung says from beside him, and San turns his head to give him a reassuring smile. It’s not fake this time. He doesn’t bother. It’s just tired, and a bit apologetic. “I didn’t realise.”

“This?” San holds up his finger, glances down at it. “It’s really nothing.”

It isn’t what Junyoung meant and they both know it, and maybe it’s selfish but San doesn’t really want to reassure his apology. Because it isn’t Junyoung who fucked up his day, and it isn’t Junyoung’s fault for not realising he was hanging by a thread for most of it considering that San had gone out of his way to make sure he didn’t know.

But then, he thinks perhaps Junyoung probably deserves that reassurance. He’s still San’s friend, despite the distance and the time that has changed them - because he has to allow that Junyoung must have changed too in places that San can’t quite see, and he knows how it hurts to be told _you haven’t changed a bit_ \- and he deserves that consideration. 

He does. 

Because even if Junyoung can’t take care of San the way Seonghwa does, that doesn’t simply mean he doesn’t _care._ It can’t.

So he knocks his leg against Junyoung’s to draw his apologetic eyes up from where they’ve fallen, smiles another honest smile. “It’s okay,” he says, resting his cheek on his knees. “It’s not your fault. I didn’t want to ruin your day.”

Yunho’s come back with the first aid kit by then, and San lets Seonghwa gently tug his hand into his hold, watches silently as Seonghwa pours water over his skin and wipes away the slight traces of blood because he knows that as much as Seonghwa hates this it’s still something he needs to do. 

One of his friends is hurt, in more ways than is visible, and he can’t sit down with some gauze and a bandaid to patch up the bruises on San’s heart but at least he can fuss over this silly little injury to reassure himself that he’s helped. 

“Still…” Junyoung looks doubtful and apologetic, and San finds that’s okay. Finds that it doesn’t hurt nearly as much to tell people who care about him how he feels than it does to pretend he doesn’t. 

Seonghwa dries off his hand, dabs some iodine on the near-invisible cut, and wraps a small bandaid around the tip of San’s finger. 

“You’ve got to kiss it better,” Yunho teases, crouched on the floor and packing the box up, latching it closed.

Seonghwa’s immediate grimace of distaste manages to tear a laugh out of San, manages to surprise himself with the levity of it, and when Yunho swoops in to take San’s hand from Seonghwa and plant a loud, performative kiss on top of the largely unnecessary bandaid he does feel absurdly as though they’ve bandaged up all the other aching parts of him too.

“Do you want to go home?” Seonghwa asks, carefully cleaning his hands off with an alcohol wipe, but San shakes his head - and not only for the fact that Junyoung is here, and that Seonghwa came all this way and just arrived. 

He will want to leave, eventually. He does want to nap before their schedules come in, absolutely, and he doesn’t think he’ll be properly okay until he sleeps it off, but he also feels a lot better already with the reassurance that if his mood does drop then he won’t have to pretend it hasn’t, and that everyone here will understand. 

“We can stay for a bit,” he says, and smiles to Seonghwa’s quiet look of concern. “We can wait until Yunho’s done and then go home together.”

“Yunho won’t be done until nine o’clock tonight,” Yunho himself corrects, bouncing to his feet with the kit swinging from his hand, “because Yunho’s day job is teaching students and salary workers how to nail Red Velvet, so Yunho’s workday only really starts at three in the afternoon.”

“Personally I don’t think that’s an excuse to only ever get up at midday,” Seonghwa mutters almost to himself, but they all hear it anyway.

“Personally I think I should start charging you if you want me to keep teaching you girl group choreo like the salary worker you are,” Yunho counters, half-skipping off to put the kit away, but it’s almost like he has a sixth sense for Seonghwa’s defeated sighs. “Doesn’t feel so good, does it,” he tosses a grin over his shoulder, undaunted by Seonghwa’s unamused stare.

 _"Seoooonghwaaaa,"_ Hongjoong whines from across the table, reaching his arms out and grabbing his hands at the empty air

Seonghwa arches a brow. "What?"

"What 'what'?" Hongjoong scoffs. "Sannie's fine now, come console me."

Seonghwa pins him with a _look_ and doesn't move from where he's seated, San still tucked against his shoulder.

Hongjoong’s expectant plea quickly morphs into a scowl and it's his turn to demand, "What?" into Seonghwa’s silence.

"My favourite child was having a crisis and when I got here you were sleeping," Seonghwa says, curling his arm pointedly around San’s shoulders, which isn't exactly fair because he _is_ fine, but it's also funny for the way Hongjoong’s petulant frown turns nearly murderous. 

"I wasn't _sleeping,"_ he lies, quick to the outrageous defence. "I was resting my eyes."

"Uh huh," Seonghwa states, blatantly unconvinced.

Part of San expects Hongjoong to claim his efforts for San’s wellbeing as an act of defence, and he doesn’t think he’d really have minded if Hongjoong had said something like _I’m was the one who told him to call you in the first place_ if it let him win the limited supply, high demand of Seonghwa’s affection. 

But he doesn’t. Instead Hongjoong sours his expression almost comically and he twists around with an insulted sound, turns where he’s lying on the couch until his back is to the rest of them, stubborn and sulking. 

“I think he’s earned a hug,” San says for Hongjoong’s benefit, but Seonghwa scoffs a strange laugh and gently ruffles San’s hair.

“He doesn’t want a hug,” is all he says, vague enough to almost be cryptic, and there is no way at all for San to tell if he means that Hongjoong is asking for something _else_ or if he’s simply trying to lure Seonghwa across the room by enticing his generous heart or some other siren call for a tragic and violent death.

San doesn’t think he’d quite put it past Hongjoong to have some strange, fae-like power over people. He’s certainly charmed Seonghwa, as reluctant as Seonghwa is to show it, and San somehow feels as though Hongjoong has already won him in a way. Something about the way that small smile of his had managed to pool a kind warmth to blossom in every cell of San’s body, and the odd certainty he has that, if pushed, he would probably do anything for the chance to see that smile again.

It’s easy, then, all of that crushing weight lifted off him, for San to fall into the lap and pull of conversation that falls naturally towards them. 

Junyoung, who San feels almost foolishly to be rediscovering is in fact his friend and not just someone he knew from a time before he came here, prompts clumsy questions about San’s work the same way San had asked him about Namhae and given him all the time in the world to speak. 

He still hesitates, though; shifts a subtle glance to Seonghwa before huffing an abashed laugh and saying, “Are you sure you want me to start talking about this?”

The smile that pulls at the quiet corners of Junyoung’s lips is absolutely endeared, though, and a keen shine in his eyes reminds San of walking home from school with the sun beating hot against the backs of their necks, deepening the tans that they hadn’t yet thought to be embarrassed for. Escorting Junyoung to his home next door even five, ten years after he’d been old enough to not need San looking out for him, and the way he’d looked at San with the sky so bright that it reflected in his irises while he listened to him talk and talk and talk, insufferably non-stop, the whole way home. The way he’d always read San’s reluctance to leave a thought half-explained, and the two might sit on the grass before their houses for another hour, or perhaps two, until the sun was almost gone and the mosquitos were taking too bold an interest in their ankles. 

“It’s been a while,” is all Junyoung says, a subtle anticipation in his smile, in the bright-sky light of his eyes. “I’ve missed it.”

“Okay,” San doesn’t bother to argue the challenge, slumping back in his seat before immediately leaning forward again with an elbow planted on his knee, the excited tremble in the sands beneath his feet too much for him to feign complacency, “so… _Giselle_ first?”

Junyoung’s smile grows wider, as wide as San hadn’t realised he’d forgotten it being, and he thrills for every attentive nod and considering hum, every probing question that leads him to talk on another abstract tangent, and he doesn’t know the point where he forgets to remind himself how much he hates speaking dialect in Seoul. It’s quicker, easier, feels like his words are running downhill rather than the polite, steady pace of standard speech. It’s so _fun_ to talk quickfire and casual, to have a voice after so long of silence and claustrophobia, and he tells Junyoung everything.

Everything he can fit into the time they have about a maiden with a fragile heart, who would love to dance but can’t for fear of it giving out; a boy who loves her, unreciprocated; a charming lord who dresses as a peasant and catches her eye, invites her to dance and catches her weakened heart too. The boy discovering the lord’s true name, summoning his family who think he’s been lost. The maiden’s fragile heart breaking when she finds he’s engaged. Breaking as she dances and dances and dances and dies, and all any of them can do is watch.

He explains the Wilis, the ghosts of women who have died of heartbreak and betrayal now filled with a violent loathing for men such as those who killed them, a vicious hunger for their suffering and death. He tells of how they take Giselle’s aching soul into their cold arms and how they show her to Albrecht weeping before her grave. 

They tell her she can kill him the way he killed her, and puppeteer him like a marionette on strings, force him to dance and dance and dance the way he made her dance and dance and dance, and it might have been easy to watch him die…

But still, in spite of everything, she loves him. 

Beautifully, wretchedly, she dances with him, for him, fights the compulsive sway of the Wili’s command until the coming dawn wastes the ghosts away to mist and shadows to leave him trembling, exhausted but alive, with a red flower left atop her grave. 

And when Junyoung asks if Albrecht is evil, if he feels any remorse, if he’s a villain dressed to look like a golden prince San can’t help his bright, giddy laugh when he says, “Okay, okay, okay,” and lunges bodily into another explanation; this time of vague story arcs, the nature of ballet as an art, the blank canvas of masterful choreography. 

“They tried to transcribe choreo,” he says, waving an excitable hand, “years - _centuries_ ago. But it didn’t work and it never caught on, and the only way to learn a dance was to have it passed on by old masters to new corps. So we have _no idea,”_ he emphasises, “what ballet is even _meant_ to look like. We know it’s changed, but there’s no way to look back and say how. And choreography, that’s like,” he gestures vaguely, searching for a parallel, “like a script. And you can read _Romeo and Juliet_ like a grade ten theatre production, or you can read it like Baz Luhrmann, and technically whatever direction you take it you’re still not gonna be wrong. And there are definitely some people who play up the rich-lord-asshole of Albrecht and make it a cautionary tale, but to me he’s…” 

He smiles a little wistfully, a little helplessly. Shakes his head.

“He’s just a kid,” he says, wry. “I think it’s better like that. He was just messing around like he never got the chance to, daydreaming a little. I think he was scared - I think he was terrified when someone died for that,” he admits and rubs his hand over his heart, raises his knees to his chest. “I think he felt guilty and heartbroken and scared, and that’s why he went back to her grave. I don’t think someone who didn’t care even a little would have done that.”

“I like your Albrecht,” Seonghwa admits from where he’s moved to the other couch, Hongjoong’s head on his lap and headphones over his ears, working on something with the laptop balanced on his chest in a posture that couldn’t possibly be good for his neck. “I’ve only seen a little,” he admits, “but he seems very sweet and naive. Youthful heartbreak,” he nods a little. “Plenty of pain, but a strong will to live.”

San’s smile turns perhaps a little bitter and he says, “Yeah, well, you’re the only one who sees it now.”

“Come on, San,” Seonghwa actually honest to god rolls his eyes. “It’s not like they’re never going to stage it again.” It startles a laugh out of San and he slumps sideways in his seat, catches his elbow on the armrest of the lounge and shakes his head. “You know,” Seonghwa narrows his eyes at San, amusement lighting beneath the affected scold of his voice, “maybe _Apollo_ is just what you need. You’ve been getting too comfortable catching principal roles. A little challenge might humble you.”

“Consider me humbled,” San mutters without heat, shifting further into the back of the couch instead of sitting up for Wooyoung when he steps past his field of vision and waves for San to make room. 

It’s only when he collapses into the space San has made, slumping over him with his sweaty back pressed against San’s stomach that he realises his class is finished and Yunho has taken over, and San has been talking about _Giselle_ for a whole hour. 

“You stink,” he lies, poking his fingers against Wooyoung’s waist to have him petulantly bat San’s hand away. He doesn’t stink. There is a difference, San knows, between fresh and stale sweat, and of the two of them he’s sure he’s much more in need of a shower. 

“No you,” is all he says, and San figures that’s fair. “ ’s going on?” he asks as he uncaps some water, a breathiness to his voice that makes a weight settle in the pit of San’s stomach. 

“Hyung got cast in _Apollo,”_ Junyoung answers for him, and San is quietly relieved for his enthusiasm because he isn’t sure exactly how he could have forced himself to say it again. 

“Oh! Nice!” Wooyoung announces, an cheer that manages to convey a complete absence of understanding and an almost-sarcastic support. “What’s that,” he adds in the same tone.

“It’s…” San tilts his head to glance over at Seonghwa to ask, “neoclassical?”

Seonghwa nods and says, “Twentieth century,” as explanation.

“Not my specialty,” San says, dry. “I’ve never danced Balanchine Method in my _life_ and I need to learn it in two months,” he sighs heavily, defeated, slumping his head back onto the armrest and letting Wooyoung prop his elbows atop his hip and ribs, ignoring the tickle of it. “This is going to be a disaster,” he mutters, staring up at the high roof. It no longer feels like the end of the world, sure, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t empirically _suck._

“Listen,” Wooyoung huffs after a beat of silence, shifting against San to wipe a drop of sweat that’s curling down his cheek against the shoulder of his shirt, “it’s not that it’s all going in one ear and out the other, but.” He turns his head, looks directly at San. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

San blinks steadily at him, feels the weight of his eye contact and doesn’t shift away from it as he thinks of a way to explain the absolute mess he’s being subjected to. “Balanchine is to ballet what Stravinsky is to classical music,” he summarises, and finds he’s quite satisfied with the parallel.

“I got nothing,” Wooyoung admits.

Mingi snorts a laugh from where he’s been mostly silent the whole afternoon, alternating between reluctantly working on what San has pieced together are raps from the way he’ll mumble a quick phrase under his breath and write something down, and stealing glances at Hongjoong as though trying to gauge how long he has before Hongjoong wants him to record.

He’s flicking the pen between his hands now, leaning back in his chair to take a break from it, watching them with an almost apathetic look in his sharp eyes. “It’s almost like the classism of imperialist art is gatekeeping anyone from understanding anything you’re talking about,” he says, the observation rolling dry off the low pitch of his voice.

It gives San pause despite it’s something he’s long since known, makes him stop to think for a moment and phrase it into the context of the conversation they’re having. “Am I classist? Genuinely asking,” he says to Mingi, a frown furrowing his brow. “Genuinely concerned.”

“I’d say,” Seonghwa considers, “we’re more cogs in the machine of systemic classism.”

“I don’t think that’s as reassuring as you think it sounds,” San admits.

“You aren’t what the French revolted against,” Mingi reasons, “but you _are_ an enduring symbol of the power that abused them.”

Wooyoung, his narrowed eyes pinballing between the three of them, says, “Look, I don’t _think_ I’m stupid? But this conversation does not exist within the parameters of my acceptably mainstream interests.”

“I don’t know anything about imperialism,” Hongjoong speaks up from where he’s still propped against Seonghwa’s thigh, headphones still over his ears and attention unwavering from his laptop, “but I’d probably say Stravinsky is to classical music what Sonic Youth is to the Ramones.”

“Oh,” Wooyoung looks at him, eyes widening for a moment before he softens his expression into something almost patronisingly pitiful. “Oh, wow. I’m so sorry,” he says to San, too sincere to really mean it. San rolls his eyes at him, jabs him half-playfully in the waist once more.

Seonghwa, evidently still caught on the topic, asks of the room, “Could we potentially be defined as class traitors?”

“Depends,” Mingi shrugs, spinning the pen around his fingers, evidently relieved for the distraction from the looming threat of Hongjoong’s deadline.

“On _what?”_ San demands, aghast, his teasing of Wooyoung abruptly forgotten.

“Probably something like,” Hongjoong mutters, still paying more attention to his computer than what they’re saying, _“If someone like David Koch offered to build a theatre for your dance company would you take the money and name the building after him?”_

There’s a beat of silence, San and Seonghwa exchanging an unsubtle glance with NYCB’s name hanging over them - both stuck in the impasse of agreeing with what Hongjoong’s saying, but unable to say anything to vocalise their opinions on the matter. Cogs in the machine of systemic classism, absolutely. San definitely gets what Seonghwa and Mingi were saying, right then.

“I have no idea who David Koch is,” Wooyoung speaks into the sudden silence, “but I feel like the correct answer is no?”

“The correct answer is no,” Hongjoong affirms.

“I feel the need to put it out there,” San says, mostly for the record no-one is keeping, “but I have about five dollars in cash. That’s it.”

“Dance for His Majesty, Fool,” Mingi quips from across the room.

 _“Look,”_ San emphasises, vexed, but is admittedly reassured by the low, brash tone of Mingi’s laughter and a reluctant, almost helpless smile eases onto his face. 

Effortless, instinctive, his eyes fall back to Wooyoung half-expecting him to make some other clever comment and a reply he hasn’t even thought of already sitting on his tongue. But the look on Wooyoung’s face is startlingly reserved. Closed off, and perhaps a little calculating. A narrow-eyed stare almost approaching a scowl. Something sour and vaguely distrusting in the subtle articulation of his expression. 

The amusement dies in San’s throat and he doesn’t know what it is that has made Wooyoung look at him like that, but it sinks like a quiet discomfort through him when Wooyoung doesn’t say anything at all. Just turns his head to look at someone else, shifts to angle his back almost haughtily towards San. 

The near-insulting pettiness of the gesture might not have been enough to prickle San’s ire if only the unconscious toss of Wooyoung’s head didn’t sway the chains of his earrings, if the angle of his silent childishness didn’t draw the line of his jaw stubborn and sharp, if the quiet petulance of him resting heavily on his elbow to dig it against San’s ribs didn’t settle his weight sticky-hot and disgustingly pleasant against him. 

It’s a gesture small enough that only San notices it, and it might not have been enough to piss him off if only he hadn’t realised in that same moment that the reason he’d expected Wooyoung to say something is because he _wants_ Wooyoung to say something - and if only the quickstep glissade of that unfounded thought hadn’t tumbled him within a count of half-beats to the concurrent coincidence of realisation that he wants Wooyoung to say something because he wants Wooyoung to _want_ San to apologise - to demand for San to backtrack over some mistake he hadn’t realised he’d made. 

He wants Wooyoung to say something because he wants Wooyoung to _care_ whether San fucks up enough to hurt him, and he wants Wooyoung to care because San - stupidly, inevitably, moronically - already does.

And that unfortunate sequence of realisations, all filtered through in the half-moment between San catching Wooyoung’s sour glare and Wooyoung turning away, settle a sudden frustration to sit hot in his throat alongside the hunger that’s churning weakly in his stomach, the exhaustion curling at his limbs, and the stress that’s starting to beat a headache between his brows.

How on-brand for someone like _Wooyoung,_ he wonders with irrational irritation prickling beneath his skin and a sharp glare trained on the obstinate back of Wooyoung’s head, for someone to realise they might have fallen a little too far just a little too fast in the same moment as being singled out as the fight he’s decided to pick for the day.

Impulsive, petty, San wedges a knee against the small of his back and _shoves,_ sudden and firm, to push Wooyoung off him and off the couch and onto the floor with a defensive, outraged yelp. 

“What was _that_ for?” Wooyoung snaps, his voice cracking high and sharp and sour, whipping around to pin San with a chilling look. 

He should probably just shrug and apologise. 

He should probably just pretend he hadn’t meant it. 

“Why did you glare at me?” San says despite _knowing_ better, because there is just something about Wooyoung shooting side-eyed scowls without saying a damn word that, while he knows he’ll be better off with a flight response, makes him want to firm his ground, level a glare back and _fight._

“I didn’t,” Wooyoung sulks, but the way he turns his head to avoid San’s look is telling enough. 

“You _did,”_ San emphasises, pushing up to sit properly on the lounge, leaning around to force Wooyoung to look at him. “What did I do?”

“Nothing!” Wooyoung is defensive, backed into a corner like he absolutely never would have dreamed that San would dare to say anything about it. “I was just _looking_ at you, that’s just my face.”

“I know what your face looks like, Woo,” San counters, stubborn. He’s started this now. He doesn’t even know if he knows how to let it go. “Seriously.”

 _“Seriously,”_ Wooyoung mocks, his face twisting with it. “If you don’t know then it’s none of your business. Maybe it wasn’t even about you,” he snarks.

“It sure seemed pretty targeted, considering you were looking me dead in the eye,” San bites back.

He might have gone for more - he can practically see Wooyoung’s frustration bubbling just beneath his skin, and some stupid part of him wants to poke it til it overflows, see what happens when he gets really properly irritated the way he’s making San feel - but then Seonghwa calls out, “San-ah,” and he grudgingly remembers that now probably isn’t the time, or the place, or the company in which to see what might happen if he gets on Wooyoung’s bad side. “Not today, please.”

“I didn’t even do anything,” he mutters, slumping back into the seat, arms folded over his chest, before realising he’s one wrong word away from being a sulky ten-year-old whining _but he started it!_

Seonghwa just shakes his head in silent warning, lips pressed together, and San turns his cheek away to scoff a sharp sigh.

“See?” Wooyoung scowls, shoving himself up to his feet and brushing off the seat of his pants, but is equally quelled beneath Seonghwa’s stern glare. 

“Young-ah,” he emphasises, pointing for Wooyoung to sit down. “You too.”

“Seriously?” Wooyoung seethes, roughly fitting himself between San and Junyoung on the couch. 

_“Seriously,”_ San mocks twice as pettily as Wooyoung had before.

“SERIOUSLY,” Hongjoong snaps from across the room, ripping the headphones off and levelling the two of them with a truly chilling glare. “I can’t even hear myself _think.”_ He feels Wooyoung jolt and freeze up next to him - an infuriating parallel to his own reaction to the ice in Hongjoong’s voice. He holds them with that unshakable glare for a truly terrifying stretch of seconds, ensuring they aren’t about to start all over again, before roughly shoving the headphones back over his ears, gritting out, “It was bad enough when there was just one of you.”

The silence of Hongjoong’s outburst and San’s silent grudge against Wooyoung lasts almost a whole minute before San hears something that makes him crane his neck over from where he’s been glowering at the opposite wall. 

“Yeah, if he was my hyung I’d be booking it out of here too,” Wooyoung had muttered to Junyoung, his naturally loud voice settled to a snarky pitch that is quite intentionally articulated to be too quiet for Seonghwa and Hongjoong to hear, but purposefully loud enough to catch San’s attention.

“No,” Junyoung tries to defend, shielding the screen of his phone, “that’s not-”

“Oh,” San sits up out of his slouch, his antagonism with Wooyoung and equally with the sudden realisation that San might _like_ him quickly forgotten, “when do you leave?”

Junyoung hesitates for a moment before admitting, abashed, “In about an hour.”

“Do you know how to get to the depot?” San asks, peering around Wooyoung so that Junyoung can see the concerned pinch of his brows.

“I can take a bus from down the road,” he refers back to his phone, “in about five minutes.”

“Let’s go, now,” he rushes, unfolding himself from his seat. “I’ll walk you down.”

“I’m coming too,” Wooyoung is quick to intercede before Junyoung can ever utter a perfunctory protest to San, already catching his hand beneath Junyoung’s elbow and dragging him to his feet. 

San wants to roll his eyes, wants to bite out a _seriously?_ but remembers just how well that’s gone for either of them in the past and wisely holds back. 

Junyoung waves a sheepish goodbye to Mingi, who gives a lazy salute and a small grin, and Hongjoong, who doesn’t notice for a moment until Seonghwa shakes his knee once to jolt his attention. 

“It was good to see you, Junyoung,” Seonghwa says, warmly and kindly. “Come visit again soon.”

Junyoung nods, a little flushed when he murmurs, “Thank you, hyung.”

Seonghwa smiles, a silent approval of the name, and twists his arm over the back of the couch to call out, “Sannie,” as he passes to pick up his bag. “Have you eaten?”

He hesitates, remembers the lie he’d told Junyoung earlier, and mutely shakes his head. 

“Get something on the way back,” he advises, “before you bite Woo’s head off.”

Embarrassed to have his habits so easily called out, San ducks his head in a nod to avert his eyes, mutters, “Okay,” because he knows Seonghwa won’t let him get away with giving a snarky _whatever_ like a moody teen and slings his bag over his shoulder, checks to make sure he’s got his phone and wallet before chasing after where Wooyoung’s pulling Junyoung towards the door. 

The bus stop really isn’t all that far away, and they make it with a minute or two to spare. It’s San making sure Junyoung has everything, apologising again for souring his day. Telling him to message when he gets back safely, and to let San know if the agency furthers his application. Wooyoung steals Junyoung’s phone briefly to add him on whatever rushed social media he can find as the bus rounds the corner and Junyoung is beaming, waving, thanking them, and he half-steps towards San before seeming to think better of it, angling away to make for where the bus will stop.

“Come here,” San says, recognising the gesture, and catches Junyoung’s wrist to pull him into the hug that he had resented him for at the start of the day. “Get home safe,” he bids, quickly running the flat of his palm up and down Junyoung’s back between his shoulders. “Call us if you need anything. Okay?” 

“Okay,” he hears against his chest, buoyed and sweet, and San pushes him away firmly but not unkindly, ushers him towards where the bus door is swinging open. 

They wait until the bus has peeled off, San waving again as he sees Junyoung standing in the busy aisle, and watch as it rounds the corner and leaves them in a temporarily placid silence before Wooyoung turns back the way they came and starts walking without a word.

San stares at his back for a moment, looks at the half-dried sweat clinging through the back of his black shirt and the tangle of tattoos winding up his arms and wonders if he should just let him go. 

Then, with one last roll of his eyes, he jogs to catch up, slowing to match Wooyoung’s steps and bumping their shoulders together. 

“Wanna tell me what’s up?” he prods, and can’t quite help what remains of his reluctant grudge that seeps into his tone.

“Nothing’s up,” Wooyoung says, crisp and clean. Practically confirming it as a lie.

San is quickly discovering that Wooyoung is, in fact, a terrible liar.

He’s simultaneously discovering that he thinks it’s a bit cute, and then kicks himself for it. Because as cute as it might be, Wooyoung is sulking. But he’s sulking quietly - and while San isn’t sure how to define the difference, this is absolutely not the loud performative sulking that San has gotten used to (and in some embarrassing way quite endeared by).

But San has already pieced together now that Wooyoung, not so much disliking silence, simply can’t abide it. The exuberance of him is like water filling every space it can find, and as the emptiness of San’s silence stretches around them he can practically feel Wooyoung’s stoicism melting against the need to fill it. 

“He likes you, you know,” is what Wooyoung says at length, the misplaced cheer and tease of it telling San that this is not what has actually been bothering him at all - but figures it will do more to reward Wooyoung’s willingness to talk at all by indulging whatever non-issue he’s talking about. Briefly, at least.

“Who?” he asks, blinking over at Wooyoung.

Wooyoung gives him a look, as though he really can’t believe San. “You seriously didn’t realise?”

San blinks at him again, gives a confused frown. Their steps have slowed, he notices. Wooyoung’s forceful near-rush to leave San behind has abated and they’re walking steadily now, almost strolling, and Wooyoung is looking at him like he’s stupid. 

“How long has he been looking at you like you hung the stars in the sky, _hyung?”_ he taunts, but there’s still an edge to it that San hopes will be eased before they get back.

“Oh,” he says, looking ahead and tilting his head back slightly to look at the thin alley of sky between the rise of buildings around them, “Junyoung? We grew up together,” he shrugs, “so I guess forever.”

“And you never realised he had an embarrassingly huge crush on you,” Wooyoung states like he can’t quite believe it.

Something lurches in San’s chest, and he chooses to ignore it. He shrugs, lowers his eyes down to the path and kicks at a stray rock, knocks it further down the walkway and watches it skitter towards Wooyoung’s side. “He’s my neighbour’s kid, so I looked after him a bunch. He’s like a little brother to me.”

“And you’re like the boy next door to him,” Wooyoung counters, kicking the same rock as they pass it. 

“I don’t see it like that,” San admits, because he’s _never_ seen it like that, and while it kind of makes a lot of things make sense he doesn’t think it changes in any way any of the affection he has for Junyoung. 

“I’m not talking about how you see it,” Wooyoung says, knocking the rock again. 

They both watch as it races across onto San’s side of the path and they walk in slow, steady silence until they catch up to it once more, until San kicks it again, until Wooyoung’s chewing his lip at the absence of sound, and they reach it again before he admits like a stormwall bursting, the ocean waves of his words tumbling out of him, “I just feel _stupid.”_

San glances at him, taken aback, a frown creasing between his brows, and realises a moment later that both of them had forgotten to keep shuffling the rock along the path with them, stepping over it unnoticed. 

Something about Sisyphus rings in his mind, and he shakes it away.

“Like, dumb,” Wooyoung grits, dragging an agitated hand back through his hair before letting it fall down, and San is certain now they’re not talking about Junyoung anymore. “Like, I have no idea what things you guys were talking about but you all got it and I was just sitting there like, oh, dumb Wooyoung,” he scoffs, “doesn’t understand fucking fine art and classism.”

“Wooyoung…” San trails off, not sure what he’s meant to say but knowing he needs to reassure this as much as Wooyoung needs to say it.

“Like I get it, I’m not as _cultured_ or whatever,” he almost sneers the word, “and it’s not like I’m mad at you for anything,” he admits, his scowl resolutely set on his feet. “It just feels shitty to not know what’s going on when _everyone else in the room gets it.”_

 _“Wooyoung,”_ San cuts him off, firmly this time, and figures the best way to respond is the way he figures Wooyoung would; with the first thing that comes to mind. “Art is stupid.”

“...What.” Blank, and perhaps a touch exasperated.

“All of it, the whole,” San gestures vaguely, “concept of art is just. Completely made up, and it only has value if people _see_ it. Classism is… making art expensive because you don’t want others to enjoy it,” he says, rubbing wearily at his brow, “and that’s the stupidest part of the whole thing. It exists to be enjoyed, who gives a shit what it looks like?”

Their steps had been slowing since Wooyoung spoke up, and at this they come to a complete halt.

“Did you just swear?” Wooyoung forces a laugh. “At me? Did you just swear at your _job?”_

 _“Wooyoung,”_ he almost groans, and thinks to add his persistence at dodging questions to the list of things which San shouldn’t be endeared by, particularly in this context, but can’t help but find himself enchanted with. Instead of pushing it he sighs, steels himself as he picks up his feet to keep walking, eyes on a cafe at the corner. “What have you been listening to lately?”

“Seventeen,” is Wooyoung’s quick, effortless answer.

San holds out his hand. “Let me hear.”

Skeptical, suspicious, Wooyoung asks, “Why?”

“Because it’s been three days since I’ve listened to a single song with a human voice that doesn’t run for twenty minutes straight,” San answers, plain-faced and honest.

There’s a hesitation in the silence that pulls between them this time, as though Wooyoung is looking through him inside and out and evaluating the intent of San’s request. His steps halt outside the cafe when San makes to go in, and he pauses to face Wooyoung.

 _“Do_ you think I’m stupid?” he asks, his narrowed eyes keen and almost untrusting. For all his soft-lipped sycophantry, Wooyoung right then looks more than anything like the thorns that hide beneath a briar rose’s silk petals. The ruthless undertow beneath a white-capped wave.

San knows it wouldn’t be fair of him to laugh this off, and somehow knows too that even if he did and it brought back his playful smile there will be a distance between them that will be endlessly more difficult to break. He is the tide edging back, and San thinks he would move the moon from its course if he knew it would draw him back. 

“You have no interest whatsoever in classical ballet,” he says, no affectation to the words, and looks Wooyoung straight in his bright, suspicious eyes as he says it. Lets himself be read by that aggressive passivity. “Why on earth would I think you’re stupid for not knowing the exact date the French Revolutionaries decided to stop hating the opera?”

Wooyoung watches him, his expression not shifting. “And you want to hear this song because…?”

“Because I know you’re not stupid,” San says, forthright and blunt, “but I don’t want you to feel as though you haven’t shown me that.”

Wooyoung holds his stare for a moment, sharp and considering for a long stretch of seconds before shouldering past San into the cafe and muttering, “If you even pretend you don’t like it I’m going to steal your sweater for emotional damages.”

San holds out his arms a little, glances down at himself in vague confusion. It’s nothing special, really. A light lilac jumper, a little bit oversized, the word BOOZE written across the front in black block letters. He wouldn’t exactly say it’s his favourite article of clothing, but he also hadn’t quite anticipated putting it up for auction against Wooyoung’s whims. “Okay.”

Not entirely sure of what he’s gotten himself into but somehow still managing to be pleased with himself for getting here, he follows Wooyoung inside without bothering to hope that he might spare San’s foolish heart more reasons to think he’s cute.


	6. rite of spring

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi this chapter is late and short and mostly filler and i had a surprisingly difficult time writing it until, to absolutely no-one's surprise, i figured out a way to add more sanhwa than is strictly necessary
> 
> Would also like to credit the first paragraph to my lord, my saviour, the cucumber to my airplane, @laughingalonewithducks, without whom i would probably still be here today but like with a slightly different chapter because i was vry stuck at first and when i asked them for a sentence to start they first offered the immortal:
> 
> "WHAT DA HELL ARE YOU DOING YOU MOTHERFUCKERS!!!!!!!!!"  
> It was................................................................................Wooyoung!
> 
> but then i left them on read for a while on accident and they came through like a true friend would <3

The cafe is tucked away into a little sidestreet off the main thoroughfare; decorated with kitschy paintings of birds and varnished wooden stools, it is a peaceful, cozy place. Unfortunately, the coffee they serve tastes like it had been freshly scooped out of a duckpond and briefly microwaved, but you can’t have everything.

Despite that, Wooyoung still took the liberty of ordering another four takeaway cups for them to pick up on the way out and ruthlessly declined any of San’s attempts to help pay. 

"Consider it class warfare," is what he says as he slides into a table by the window, his coffee in one hand and San’s in the other. "I won't be beholden to the bourgeoisie, or whatever," he rolls his eyes.

"First you'll say you're planning to steal my clothes, now you're buying me lunch," San mutters as he eyes the barista toasting his croissant in a sandwich press behind the counter. "The mixed signals are overwhelming." He really hadn't realised just how hungry he'd been all day until the smell of it spreads buttery-warm over the back of his tongue.

"Be honest," Wooyoung says, pushing the cup into San’s hands, "do you have enough money in your account right now, without shifting like ten dollars from savings, to be buying your own lunch."

San considers lying, and then settles for taking a sip of his drink, muttering mulishly around the straw, "I get paid on Tuesday."

"Well mine came in today," Wooyoung challenges, inordinately smug, "so, you're welcome."

"I'll pay you back," San tries to insist, and Wooyoung snorts a short laugh.

"Sure," he says, leaning back in his seat with his drink tucked against his shoulder, eyes narrowed in an almost scathing sort of amusement. "And when I order a full-course breakfast on your tab don't say you didn't mean it."

"Are you gonna show me this song or are you gonna keep gold digging?" San challenges, pitying his meagre wages against Wooyoung’s insatiable satisfaction. 

“Come over here,” Wooyoung commands, shifting his seat closer to the window by all of three centimeters. “You’re watching the music video too. This is what I’ve been studying for the past week,” he says as San moves, as though seizing the chance to speak before it might disappear. “I won’t make you read, like, a ten-page analysis or anything,” he adds almost ruefully as he unlocks his phone and opens youtube to a half-viewed video of  _ Fallin’ Flower  _ which he briskly scrubs back to the start, “but just  _ look  _ and - you’ll get it. You’ll get it,” he repeats, assured and certain, and hands San an airpod that he fishes from his pocket.

And from the first lilt of violin San kind of  _ does  _ get it. He isn’t quite fluent in Japanese - not enough to catch every line of the song - but what he doesn’t hear is filled in by what he sees, and there’s such a beauty in the composition that he finds himself caught up, swept away. There’s an ache and a lovely, dear fervency to it - a desperate adoration like sand trickling from between the fingers of a clenched fist, or the end of a sweet summer drawing near when leaves start falling from the trees.

It’s effortless, beautiful, the quick-shot of scenes shifting and blending, an association and flow between the transitions that make it so natural and smooth, and with Wooyoung’s petulant  _ I’m a videographer  _ sitting in the shell of his ear he thinks to take notice of the little tricks of composition that he wouldn’t usually think about.

“It’s so clever, see-” Wooyoung speaks over the music, interrupts the song to skip back a few frames and San finds he doesn’t even mind all that much with the excitably sweet pitch of Wooyoung’s voice as he speaks. “You don’t even notice,” he says as he replays that part, “but even if you don’t, it still tricks your brain into thinking  _ fuck that’s good,  _ without even realising exactly  _ why.  _ See here,” he points at the screen as though San hadn’t already been looking. “So you have this downward momentum right - the  _ BWASH  _ of the paintbrush coming down,” he rattles off, mirroring the gesture of the shot, “then the white sheet falling,” he narrates, “and when it covers the screen they transition again to another scene with another sheet dropping away in the foreground to reveal the shot and… it just  _ keeps going?”  _ he all but bursts out like it’s a question, very nearly bouncing in his seat. 

San doesn’t really know when exactly he’d started smiling through it, but he can’t really think of why he should have to stop now, hazarding a glance at Wooyoung to find him absolutely enraptured by the video. “So you’ve been studying the filmmaking of it,” he needlessly questions, and Wooyoung gives a distracted nod.

“Yeah, composition and transitions and shit,” Wooyoung answers distractedly, nearly cutting himself off to scrub back a few seconds. “Here, see? It’s the same set, but seeing different parts with the camera angle changes how we perceive the environment,” he explains, and San half-regretfully drags his attention away from the bubbling excitement on his face to look at what he’s pointing out. 

“And then this lightflare fade between one scene and the next,” Wooyoung adds, “but it’s still the same set being filmed with the same momentum. All that changed was the lighting and subject,” he says, “but it gives a completely different feeling. And you feel that here, right?” he jabs a tattooed finger gently below San’s diaphragm, just firm enough to force some air from his lungs and make him gasp. “That little swoopy gut-drop, like even if you don’t really notice what it is or understand what you’re seeing, your body still knows what it  _ means  _ when the flowers disappear and there’s only desert left.”

“The dance is pretty,” San murmurs, leaning forward to try and map the purposeful punctuation of their hands as they twist and fall, giving a curious attempt at mirroring it, wondering abstractly if he could manage it.

“It is!” Wooyoung enthusiastically agrees. “I’ve wanted to learn it for a while, but it’s hard without a whole group and my students aren’t quite there yet. The performance shots, though,” he says, tapping his forefinger along the top of the phone, “they’re just as pretty as the b-roll, and it all ties in so neat.”

“Wait,” San says as the song comes to a close, “wait, I wanna listen again, properly this time.”

“Okay, okayokayokay,” Wooyoung enthusiastically agrees, dragging it back to the start. “I won’t interrupt this time, promise.” 

He does, in the end, to point out some other part San definitely would have missed if it hadn’t been shown to him by Wooyoung, and San loves to hear him talk about the art of it enough that he presses more questions, just so he can hear Wooyoung’s answers. 

They end up watching the video three times over, and then Wooyoung is pulling the screen down and searching for a clean shot of the choreography and the two of them press close to the phone to discuss the details and intricacy of the movements and shifting formations; a visualisation of petals falling and branches blooming. Then a mirrored version of the same video so they can each try to copy the erratic delicacy of that final gesture.

By the end of it they’re laughing and they’re warm and San’s cheeks almost hurt from his smile, and Wooyoung had stolen half his croissant, and the coffees they ordered for the others are going cold on the counter. 

He’s half-humming near half an hour after dragging Wooyoung into the cafe for their late lunch, helping him carry the cups and hoping the coffee doesn’t taste quite as terrible cold as it did while lukewarm, and the song is irrevocably stuck in his head. Without any heat, he absolutely holds Wooyoung to account when he sings patchy lyrics he only mostly understands beneath the chime of the bell as they leave.

“You have a nice voice,” Wooyoung observes after a long moment of almost humming along, and San glances at him, almost surprised. “Kind of light and airy,” he makes a gesture that San can’t really distinguish, but which his mind suggests might have been shaking a clean sheet out to lie atop a bed. Probably not, though. He doesn’t know what that has to do with his voice. “Don’t let Hongjoong hear you sing,” Wooyoung warns next, pointing a condemning finger towards San despite how full his hands are.

“I don’t sing at all, really,” he admits, tilting his head a little. Most of his preferred arts had only ever been silent, or the sharp kihaps of taekwondo. He’s only ever danced or fought; he doesn’t think he even knows how to sing, beyond the intuitive human instinct of noisemaking. 

And even then he tries not to. He’s been told enough times that his silence is preferred; enough to make him wonder if it’s less instinct, and more madness.

“Well, you should,” Wooyoung shrugs effortlessly, “because it’s pretty. But if Hongjoong hears you,” he shakes his head despairingly, but it does nothing to hide the grin playing at the corners of his lips. “Well, Mingi was originally meant to be studying  _ floristry.  _ And now Hongjoong’s got him writing raps in sketchy warehouse studios.”

“That’s  _ your  _ sketchy warehouse studio,” San reminds, almost laughing. “What, did he see you dancing and sign you on to Yunho?”

“Something like that,” Wooyoung vagues around answering, bumps a short skip into his step. “Most of our students are just passionate and bored, but some of the kids want to be idols. Yunho’s happy with the others, likes keeping it casual, but I…” He hesitates, seems to choose his words. “I know that industry a bit better, so he gives me the ones who seriously wanna go there.”

San frowns a little, thoughts picking at his words. “Did you train Jongho, then?” he asks, thinking of the kid he’d met all of once but heard more than a little about, Yunho talking about him when he comes up like he’s a favoured child, a star to wish upon.

Wooyoung laughs a little, gestures as though to wave it off. “You know, barely. I taught him how to dance a little and told him who to talk to, but Jongho’s got an ambition bigger than his voice and he can _sing._ He did all that himself,” he nods decisively, “really.”

San doesn’t doubt that Wooyoung is severely underselling himself, and if the subdued respect and roundabout adoration he’d seen Jongho scoff in Wooyoung’s direction that night had been any indication then he’s sure Jongho at least feels as though he owes a whole lot more than Wooyoung would ever accept from him.

Thinking on that night, though, he remembers Wooyoung’s familiarity with Yeosang, and something about  _ six years,  _ and the way Yeosang had fallen almost too easily into dancing alongside him, and the way he’d never once mentioned Wooyoung’s name to San before. And then, something small and sharp falls into place like a sliver of broken glass set in to reform a shattered window.

“Were you,” he starts before he can think better of it, and almost chokes on his words with how quickly he forces himself to stop. But Wooyoung is looking at him, head tilted a little, and San thinks he knows from the narrowed set of his eyes that his curiosity will batter them bruised and bleeding if San decides to keep his mouth shut now. “You and Yeosang,” he says, looking down the road to where they’re approaching Yunho’s studio because he doesn’t think he can look Wooyoung in the eye with this question. “When you met, was it…?”

He can’t bring himself to phrase it more explicitly than that, but he doesn’t think he really needs to when Wooyoung’s feet stop dead in their tracks. San mirrors him, glances guiltily at his expression from the corner of his eye.

He looks frightfully calm, and equally as suspicious. “Did Yeosang tell you?”

San considers lying, but then considers that Wooyoung is probably closer than San is with Yeosang, and Yeosang is absolutely closer than San is to Wooyoung, and figures that a little white lie to save his ass would soon enough end up digging him into a pretty deep hole with both of them. “Seonghwa did,” he admits, quietly.

“Seonghwa,” Wooyoung repeats, and there’s a danger beneath his calm. Something big and sleek and deadly shifting beneath calm waters, barely rippling the surface. 

“Wait, wait wait,” San rushes, stepping quickly between Wooyoung and the studio, “he didn’t just  _ tell  _ me, he isn’t…”  _ He isn’t like that.  _ “Yeo was really…and I was worried, and Hwa was worried too, and he didn’t know how to help so he told me what Yeosang told him in case I might know what to do, but I didn’t,” he rushes through this clumsy explanation, then feels himself become quiet and apologetic for the both of them. “I still don’t.”

Wooyoung clicks his tongue and looks as though, had his hands been any less full, he’d have liked to pinch between his brows. “You’re all so stupid,” he mutters, picking his feet up and brushing past San mulishly but without heat. “Why didn’t you just  _ tell me?” _

“Because I didn’t know you existed?” San reasons, grumbling now that the imminent danger of Wooyoung’s temper has passed. “Seriously, it’s not like we’re gossiping behind his back, and he hardly makes it easy to look out for him.”

“It takes a village to help a Yeosang,” Wooyoung comments drily, but at least he seems to be agreeing with San on this. “Look, just don’t tell them you know. They’ll probably assume I’m the one who spilled, and I do  _ not  _ wanna be where Seonghwa is right now. And another thing,” he whirls around suddenly enough that San almost walks right into him, a finger jabbing against San’s sternum and very nearly spilling coffee onto his sweater. “Don’t go around thinking he’s holding grudges just ‘cause. It wasn’t whatever stupid bleeding heart romance shit you probably think it is. Seonghwa broke Yeo’s trust,” he emphasises, an iron force in the unwavering stare he levels up at San. “And I’m not about to do something stupid and middle-school-playground like picking sides or whatever, but that still sucks. A  _ lot.” _

“I’ll be honest,” San admits, “I have no idea about the details. And unless me knowing would magically fix it,” he adds, “I’d rather not get involved.”

Wooyoung’s eyes narrow a little, evaluating him, before he seems to hum a short satisfaction and turn back around, making once more for the wide open studio doors. “You’re a lot nicer once you’ve eaten,” he says, and he definitely sounds like he’s grinning again, so San rolls his eyes at Wooyoung’s back and steps up to walk beside him, a small smile pulling helplessly at the corners of his lips.

* * *

The schedule doesn’t look too bad on paper, once Seonghwa makes San write out the next two months in his planner. His classes with the choreographer are four days a week for the first two weeks, and then three for the next month, and then two for the last two weeks as the corps works together for more and more full rehearsals of the whole program. 

On an evening class San will have the morning free, on a morning class he will review over the afternoon, and any weekday that he has no schedule he’ll be rehearsing on his own, or alongside his partners. As the choreo classes lessen, San will take more whole days to review.

He’d half-pushed for Seonghwa to let it cut into his weekend too, but Seonghwa had staunchly refused even the idea of it. 

“It might not look like much,” he’d said, “but you’ll be overwhelmed, Sannie.” 

He’d tried to have Seonghwa let him go in early before his evening classes, much to the same effect. Maybe there is some merit to him saying so, though. He’d forgotten for a moment how exhausting it always is to be shown something completely, absolutely new, the near-overwhelming, daunting monolith of it looming over him, and then be told that he’s expected to learn it. 

The problem perhaps with all the efforts he drives into dancing is that his audience, his evaluators, only ever see the end product. They don’t see how he will struggle to grasp a concept from the beginning and fumble with it awkward and unsure and ruthlessly discouraged for a week or more before he’s almost confident enough in the basic steps to start working towards some sort of visual coherency. 

For this, he’s always been reluctant to work alongside his peers. Equal to the tense and bitter shame that comes from them seeing how little he knows, how hard he has to work even if he just wants to keep up, there is also the rotten churn of guilty apology when all he can ever do in that initial introduction is hold them back, hold them down, stagnate their own growth while they wait for him, painstakingly, to learn. 

He hasn’t worked directly with any of the other three soloists before though he knows them by name and face and, with reference to past seasons, by role. They seem to know each other, though, and San is left to wonder where exactly he belongs amidst them. If he belongs at all, or if his casting is an unwelcome intrusion. 

They’re only running through lightly on this first class - more context and technicalities of style than learning the choreography itself - and San is wishing he’d pushed harder to refuse this role. 

Yerim, who San knows studied in New York for a while at least and has always been inclined to a Balanchine  _ arabesque,  _ takes to the technique with ease. Hips that tilt and open in a way they’re never meant to in ballet  _ (you’re making me a boy with love),  _ oddly straight-edged arms whose positions change almost too quickly to map  _ (to you I’m fallin’ fallin’ fallin’ fallin’).  _

She helps him when he tries, when at least there is a flare and appealing drama to the muses’ choreography, but San is… 

Bent-kneed. Flat-footed. Odd angles and awkward posture and the complete absence of any grace. It feels  _ wrong. _ It looks raw and ugly, like wet clay in the hands of a frustrated child with no concept or idea of how to make something beautiful. 

San isn’t vain with himself. At least he doesn’t think he is. But he feels, prickled by the pride he buries deep, as though he’s earned some right to be vain about his art. 

It feels like  _ Rite of Spring,  _ barefoot and nearly disturbing. He doesn’t think he’s meant to move this way. His legs ache to turn out. What Greek tragedy of a god is this?

_ Apollo. _

He feels very nearly disgusted - with himself, or with the way he feels almost mutated for this dance.

His mind, spinning, resents the proximity of his body. He wonders if he could ever learn to like this. If he will ever find a way to stand it. If there will be a way, any way, for him to lose himself into it when it almost viscerally repulses his extant belief in what ballet is. 

“It takes a bit to get used to,” Yerim reassures him on their break, and he wonders if he must look that terrible, for her to feel as though she needs to placate him, “but it starts making sense, after a while.”

San bites back the deluge of opinions he has, both old and shiny new, of Balanchine and his genius. He smiles, and thanks her for her help. He is appreciative, and he does mean it. She isn’t the reason he quite suddenly wants the chance to have words with George Balanchine in person, despite that he’s near forty years in the grave.

His palms itch and he wants to scratch them. His skin crawls and he wants to shed it. Everything about this is  _ wrong,  _ and there’s nothing he can do but play along. 

Minyoung, at least, has the grace to wear her frustration on her sleeve. He recognises her mostly by her red-dyed hair, partly by her large eyes, and notably by her performance as Phrygia in the last season’s run of  _ Spartacus.  _ She’s muttering complaints now, the choreographer out of the room while they take their break, about how uncomfortable it is to dance Balanchine - carefully phrased, San notices, to make no comment on her own thoughts of the choreography itself.

He wishes one of their small cast might be brave enough to say that it absolutely sucks. 

“It’s weird,” Soyoung suggests, all her effort put into optimism, “but it’ll be nice to learn something new.”

Or perhaps for the next two months, the four of them will simply suffer in silent cowardice.

“How long will the learning part take, do you think?” San asks, at last taking the time to finish darning his shoes after he’d absolutely forgotten to last night and only discovered when he’d had to warm up in morning class without elastics to keep them properly fixed.

The three of them glance at Yerim, who is busily peeling a clementine by the barre. She glances back at them, equal parts startled and apologetic, before mumbling, “Maybe a month?”

“Oh, good,” Minyoung mutters, bending her pointe shoe against the floor until San hears the shank give a muffled  _ crack. _

“It could be worse?” Soyoung tries.

“I don’t know if I’m going to be able to dance properly after this,” San admits, snapping the thread between his teeth and packing the kit away - properly, this time, no loose needles floating around in his bag.

“Come  _ on,”  _ Minyoung rolls her eyes, not unkindly. “Everyone knows the only reason you’re not a principal is because the company won’t have the budget until someone else retires.”

“Same could be said for you,” he counters, sizing her up from the corner of his eye and recalling the powerful punctuation and fluidity of her Phyrgia. She absolutely should have been promoted to principal after that season. 

“If every good dancer was a soloist we wouldn’t have a corps,” Yerim recites wearily, as though it’s a line she’s been giving herself for far too long.

“Wait,” Soyoung interrupts, pointing directly at San. He arches a brow, and leans out of her finger’s trajectory only for it to follow him. He considers saying something about her tripping over fairies. “You’re friends with Seonghwa, right?”

“Yeah,” he says, crossing a leg over his thigh to roll his ankle and stretch his foot. “Why?”

“Did he give you any tips?”

He looks up and finds the three of them watching him expectantly.

Well, Soyoung and Minyoung are watching expectantly. Yerim, he thinks, is more politely intrigued.

San hesitates a moment, unsure of what they want before he offers, “He wrote up a schedule?”

_ “Yes!”  _ Soyoung announces, muffled through the cracker she shoves into her mouth to free her hands up to clap. “Can you-” She presses a hand over her mouth, quickly chews and swallows before asking, “Can you send it through?”

San blinks at her. “Sure. Where-” he starts to ask, but is cut off by her whooping cry.

“Group chat group chat group chat group chat!” she chants, lurching for her phone, and before San can even really process what’s happening his own is buzzing with a notification and she’s saying, “Send it there! We can see who’s rehearsing when and do timeslots and sort out a big masterpost thing so we can work together on all of it.”

“Check availability,” Yerim agrees around a piece of clementine. “Soyoung and San have solos, but me and Minyoung can only practice properly with all four of us.”

San hesitates a moment, suddenly reluctant to bare this part of him. It makes more than enough sense, of course, for them to organise rehearsals outside of their choreographer’s class, but he’s hyperaware now of Seonghwa begging him to take his afternoons slow, fighting to keep San’s weekends free, and it’s easy enough when it’s Seonghwa and he knows how terrified San is of falling short and he knows how hard San has to work just to meet the starting place standard, but these coworkers, these peers… they don’t know that.

They don’t know how much he has to try just to match their pace. 

He hesitates, and keeps hesitating. He doesn’t have a way out of this, really. He drops his leg away and wipes his hands on his thighs, reaches for his phone to send it through with motions more functional on instinct than thought, because if he thinks about it too much he feels as though the weight of his self-conscious shame will pressurise and collapse him into the size of a single cell of wood and then he will decompose, slowly, and disappear.

_ “Wow,”  _ Minyoung is already scrolling through. “Seonghwa made you do this?”

San wipes his palms on his thighs again, forces that close-lipped smile that makes him look small and absolutely not worth hurting. “No, he…tried to discourage it,” he laughs, light and nervous. 

“Seriously,” Soyoung agrees, “I knew you were here all the time, but I didn’t know you were here  _ all the time.” _

“Okay,” Yerim chimes, “I can do… all day Wednesday, and the Monday afternoons. I’ll be in on Friday mornings too if the Muses wanna work with me,” she lifts a quick glance to the other two and San is relieved - for a moment absolutely  _ flooded  _ with relief when he feels it rushing through him - at how quickly she moves to meet him.

“Why don’t we all book in for Wednesday,” Minyoung follows on, leaning back on one hand with her legs spread out at slapdash angles on the floor before her, scrolling through the schedule, “and we can dedicate that to  _ coda _ , or whatever else we’re having trouble with. I want Friday with Yerie though,” she levels her phone at Yerim across the room, “so you can teach me technique. And I’ll probably be in on Thursday too.”

“Wednesday’s good,” Soyoung sings, emphasising each syllable as she scrolls distractedly through. “San we can have Tuesday for  _ pas de deux,  _ right? And maybe Monday afternoons too, once we actually have the choreo. I  _ am  _ gonna take the blessing of Thursday starting late,” she harrumphs, and tosses her phone gently onto the floor, “but I’ll be in early on Friday.”

“We’ll organise the details later,” Minyoung nods, “and I’ll draw up a full schedule tonight.”

* * *

True to her promise, she asks everyone to repeat their availabilities in the group and sends an updated schedule by nine o’clock that night, colour coded and annotated and all, and Seonghwa peers at it over San’s shoulder at the table where he’s nursing ice on his ankles, alternating between each every five minutes or so while he scrolls through the day’s notifications and tries to convince his guilt that it’s already too late to call his parents, that it would be impolite and that he should put it off until tomorrow. 

(His guilt knows, though, that he won’t call them. No matter how much he knows he should.)

“Have a look?” Seonghwa asks. He’s tired. His dialect slips through, lazed and murmured and dark-blue velvet like a night sky with no stars. Clouds overhead. Heavy and warm and promising of affection. The sky reaching out to embrace the earth with rain. 

San hands off his phone without bothering even a hum of affirmation and uncrosses his legs, crosses them again to move the cold pack onto his other ankle. He rolls it a bit. Stretches it a bit. It hadn’t troubled him today, but he had taken note of a quiet twinge that had promised that if he doesn’t care for it now then tomorrow might not be so lucky. 

“I like Minyoung,” is what Seonghwa says, which isn’t all that surprising, because he says that about nearly everyone he almost knows. Finished approving that San’s teammates won’t be enabling him to overwork himself, Seonghwa locks San’s phone and leans over his shoulder to place it on the table - close enough for San to lazily slump his head backwards against Seonghwa’s stomach, eyes closed in an exhaustion that has little to do with how hard he’d worked his body. 

He figures Seonghwa is the same when he merely drapes his arms around San’s shoulders to rest warm against his chest. This, rather than to pet his head or card his fingers through San’s hair, which they both know will have San whining and pleading for more even after Seonghwa’s long since lost interest - and they both know he would acquiesce to it, too. 

“She can be loud,” he admits, patting a hand in a light, absent tempo against San’s chest that pleasantly soothes him, makes him melt further into the lazy embrace, “but she learns quickly. Works hard.”

_ “Spartacus,”  _ is all San can muster through his exhaustion to say, and Seonghwa’s hum of agreement is deep and reassuring. 

“She did a good Phyrgia. Very sharp.”

“Yerim studied Balanchine technique,” San says, balancing the cold pack on his ankle so he can curl a hand around Seonghwa’s forearm, eyes still closed and an ache that has nothing to do with his mood and everything to do with his exhaustion welling up in his throat, turning his words into a pout. “She’ll help.”

“That’s good,” Seonghwa murmurs, soothing him with a hand brushing San’s hair back from his brow that he nuzzles into, half-heartedly seeking more and letting his pout deepen when Seonghwa pulls away. “More tomorrow,” he reminds San of what, for a moment, he had managed to let himself forget. “You should get some rest.”

He lets his head fall back when Seonghwa steps back, blinking up at him upside-down. “How was  _ La Sylphide?” _

Seonghwa shrugs. “Fine.” This could mean anything anywhere from exceptionally well but he doesn’t want San to feel bad about it, or abjectly awful but he doesn’t want to have to burden San with it. 

He frowns at Seonghwa without moving at all. Purposely softens his eyes and furrows his brow and lets his pout settle small and helpless until Seonghwa can’t help but avert his eyes, a guilty sigh on his lips. 

“It was alright,” he admits. “It just feels a bit…” He trails off, his lips turning down a little at the corners. He isn’t looking at San at all. Eyes turned blankly out the window, a worried pinch between his brows. “Yeosang said something. A bit…”

San tries not to let his surprise, his sudden flash of agitation show too clearly on his face, and carefully sets the cold pack aside, rights himself and twists in the chair to face Seonghwa properly. “What was it?” he asks, chin nonchalantly resting on his folded arms. Purposely untelling of the tension suddenly coiling within him.

Seonghwa hesitates, and looks as if he’s still unsure of whether or not he should feel hurt. Unsure of whether it might be the right thing, to tell San. He’s never quite been able to lie, though, when San is the one asking. “It was nothing,” he still makes a firm attempt to defend Yeosang’s integrity. “They said- they just looked at me for a bit and said _‘fitting’,_ and I asked what they meant and then they smiled and didn’t answer, and - I don’t know for sure,” he says, troubled, looking squarely at San as though to beg him not to be angry, “but I think they were humming the Window Scene from act one, with James and the Sylph. And then they left.”

San is sure to keep his expression perfectly, neutrally clear. “Do you want me to talk to them?”

“No,” Seonghwa’s answer is quick and firm, and brooks no argument. “I don’t want it blown out of proportion,” he says. “I just want…” He hesitates, his certainty crumbling, just a little. His voice is quieter, softer, when he asks, “Do you think they’ll ever stop hating me?” 

He’s looking down this time, dark star-lit eyes watching San’s hand as it reaches out, catches one of the nervous fists at his side and smoothes it out, links their fingers together. 

“He doesn’t hate you, Hwa,” San reminds, just as quiet. “You know how Yeosang is,” he says, gently squeezes Seonghwa’s limp hand. “He’s just hurting, and he hurts people back, and you know he hates that too. Even if you did the wrong thing,” San shrugs because he truly can’t say what is wrong and right, or if there even is one, “you only did your best. And they did too,” he adds, “and eventually you’re both gonna realise that and get over all this nonsense.”

“It’s selfish,” Seonghwa says, quieter than a whisper, eyes resolutely on the floor and his fingers slack against San’s. “I miss him.”

“I know,” San aches, and holds Seonghwa’s hand in fragile silence while he closes his eyes and waits, until he surges in a breath as though clearing his dry nose, presses the back of his wrist to his eyes as though they ache, and San knows that Seonghwa has always had difficulty crying, that even though a sob will fill every inch of his body he’s only ever been told to hold his breath until it subsides. 

San has only ever felt him cry in the hush of thick felt-and-velvet curtains beyond the heat of stage lamps and watching eyes. Trembling and shaking and sobbing against San who could only catch the diamond glint of Seonghwa’s tears with his shaking hands, could only hold him close against the anxious pounding of his heart and hope that it would be enough to let him be okay. 

He hates seeing Seonghwa cry like that, but he almost hates it more to see him cry like this. Dry-eyed and silent. 

He pulls his fingers away from San’s and gives a tense smile that San knows he means with every aching breath in his tight lungs. “Thanks, Sannie,” he says, his voice too quiet, too soft.

“Go lie down, hyung,” he murmurs, and Seonghwa nods. “Do you want some tea?”

“No, I…” His voice falters, feathers out into the diffuse vapour between where a cloud ends and the sky begins. “I’ll just sleep.”

“I love you,” San says, and Seonghwa smiles again, tight and unsure and so achingly genuine.

“Love you too, Sannie.”

His bedroom door closes quietly behind him, and San wonders if it’s better that he’d helped Seonghwa talk, and possibly even reassured him a little, or if there is no catharsis or relief in this ache he has brought to the surface.

Maybe it isn’t his business to be looking after Seonghwa when he can’t do it half as well as Seonghwa looks after him. He doesn’t think that will stop him from trying, though. He won’t stop until the day Seonghwa asks him to.


	7. des grieux

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> sorry i havent updated in a while!!! and sorry i havent responded to comments yet aaa i was 300km away from phone reception all week and just got back home last night :(( so if there r any typos n stuff i wrote most of this on my phone oops
> 
> i swear more was meant to happen in this chapter, but the woosan was just....clenches fist..........giving me the Happy emotion
> 
> ty to all my fwiends who r putting up with me complaining abt Having To Write Words every time i work on a chapter lol yall the realest <3 and thank u to [@hanjisungie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hanjisungie/pseuds/hanjisungie) for enabling, of all things, a potential cattle station au. just.....bear with me........i promise it'll be good lmao (but also please.......go read their fics.......i BEG you they are so so so good u wont regret it

San expects it, but it still hurts that the next day of class is no better. It still hurts that even late into the afternoon, dripping sweat and exhausted, he doesn’t know how to make these movements work. It still hurts that he feels as though he is wasting hours, wasting days, wasting the time of everyone who wants to help him when after a whole day of Yerim’s tutelage he only barely gets it, and it decidedly hurts that by the end of that first week his progress is all but nonexistent. 

Seonghwa finds him slipping out too early on the Thursday with his bag hanging from his arm and his work clothes on under an overlarge hoodie. There is a nearly nervous caution in Seonghwa’s expression when he asks where San’s going that quickly eases into abstract relief when he says Soyoung wants to speak with him, and he’ll go out to get breakfast afterwards before he joins the afternoon class. 

It always feels oddly uneasy, how effortless it is to lie. And he knows exactly why Seonghwa doesn’t want him overworking. And he knows exactly why Seonghwa holds his breath in an expressionless silence when he forces himself not to cry. And he knows exactly why Seonghwa left Bolshoi to come home, so shining and out of place and too perfect even for the faded pink scar on his left hip. 

He knows exactly why Seonghwa doesn’t want this for him, he knows the things that Seonghwa is most afraid of, but he can’t  _ not  _ do this. It’s an impossibility. It will eat him down to the bone, and then down to nothing at all. 

All he manages to accomplish in the hours before the class is confuse himself, but at least he’s found some of the questions he needs to ask - even if he can’t quite wrap his body around the answers. He stays late, consumed by the bitter simmer of his frustration even as Soyoung and Minyoung leave for the night, and then Yerim too. 

He’s brought back by his phone ringing, and only when it almost slips out of his fingers as he brings it to his ear does he realise how his limbs are soft and shaking from exhaustion. 

“Hwa?” he asks, drying sweat from his face with the hem of his shirt, eyes locked on his own reflection in the mirror. He needs a haircut. It’s clinging to his neck, damp with sweat. Hanging in his eyes.

“Did you stay late?”

“Yeah,” he admits, not bothering to hide his laboured breaths. He runs his fingers through his hair, thick and heavy with salt. Maybe it’s long enough to tie up. That would keep it out of his way a little longer. 

“I just finished up,” Seonghwa says. “Want to go back together?”

San hesitates, and his instinct is to reassure Seonghwa that he will go home soon - just one more set, and then he’ll pack up. His eyes fall on the clock at the far wall; it’s already half past nine. He’s been here for fifteen hours. 

Just one more set. 

He chokes back the words. 

“Yeah, that sounds good,” he lies again to Seonghwa. “I’ll wash up and meet you out front.”

And the next day he does the same thing again. Lies again. Works again. Exhausts himself all over again, only now he finds he almost hates it. Hates that after a whole week he’s made no progress. Hates that he can’t lie his way around Seonghwa to work through the weekend. Hates that he’s even lied at all.

It hurts, and he’s tired. God, he’s so fucking  _ tired.  _ He’s tired of struggling every day. Struggling for Albrecht, struggling for Apollo, struggling like Sisyphus pushing a rock up a hill only for him to be unable to do anything but watch it roll back down. Struggling like Icarus swallowed by the turbulent, unforgiving ocean. 

* * *

San had forgotten that he’d realised he might have a bit more than a friendly interest in Wooyoung at the start of the week. 

He tends to do that, though. He tends to forget about people - not unkindly or with any sort of malice - until they are brought to mind. Sometimes he thinks it makes him an incredibly simple person, with only a mind to address what is in front of him. 

Sometimes he thinks it makes him abstractly cruel in a manner of unintentional inattention that drives lances of regretful guilt through his spine into his chest. 

“I’m going to pick Hongjoong up from Yunho’s,” Seonghwa says, “and make sure he eats something before work. Want to come to the studio?”

And it’s the mention of Yunho’s studio that makes San think of Wooyoung, and makes him remember his poorly-timed realisation, and makes him realise he’s barely thought of Wooyoung all week, and makes him wonder if there really is anything there at all or if he’d somehow made it all up in his head. 

It also makes him remember that he hasn’t called his parents either, and remembers that he loves them well enough when he sees them. He just can’t bring himself to keep that in mind when he’s so far from them. (It's only a few hours' drive, his guilt reminds him. It's a day trip that he doesn't make nearly often enough to be a good son to them.)

“Yeah,” he says, a moment off-beat. “I have to call someone when we get there, though.” If he doesn’t tell Seonghwa, then there will be no-one to make him follow through. It’s early evening now, on a Saturday. He has no excuse not to call them, now that the thought has crossed his mind. “I didn’t think Hongjoong…  _ went  _ to work,” he admits, emerging from where he’s slumped deep into the couch and making for his room to get changed. 

“He’s always working,” Seonghwa reasons, his voice drifting through San’s open door from the kitchen, “but he does a night shift as a radio show host six days a week.”

_ “Really?”  _ San questions as he shimmies into a pair of high-waisted jeans, finds a black v-neck folded into his wardrobe and considers for a moment before taking a short-sleeved button-up from the hanger and pulling it over the top, doing up only the last two buttons before tucking it into his waistband. “I kind of forget that they exist in real life,” he says as he wanders out, socks in hand, hopping a little to pull them onto his feet on the way to the kitchen.

“What do?” Seonghwa asks, pulling down another glass for San without needing to ask and filling it from the cold jug by his elbow.

“Radio hosts,” he says, taking the cup and throwing most of it back. He’d forgotten too, he realises, to drink water all day. 

Seonghwa arches a brow and San shrugs in return, pausing for a moment to perhaps make it seem more natural before he swiftly downs the rest of the glass and reaches for the jug to top it up. 

“He works graveyard,” Seonghwa says, “on a smaller station, too. His audience is probably students, mostly. Studying and cramming assignments and all that.”

“What sort of music does he play?”

“You could always tune in,” Seonghwa reasons, refilling the jug and putting it back in the fridge, taking his cup to the clean sink and washing it, and San’s too when he hands it over. “He’s nine to five,” he shoots an amused smile over his shoulder at San, “just the other way around.”

“So he’s  _ fully  _ nocturnal,” San surmises, taking up a towel to dry the cups and put them away to free Seonghwa up to leave.

His expression twists a little and he huffs a short sigh. “That would imply he slept at all.”

San wrinkles his nose, dries his hands on the towel and hangs it over the oven door. “I’m beginning to worry about him.”

“Such is knowing Hongjoong,” Seonghwa agrees. “Ready?” he asks, threading his arms through the neat jacket he’d left on the bench and fixing the collar, running his fingers lightly through his hair. It falls long and dark and fine, elegant just like the rest of him, and cropped short at the back. San wonders if he should ask who Seonghwa’s barber is.

“Yeah,” he fits his phone and wallet into his pockets, makes for the door to pull on his shoes. 

Seonghwa’s eyeing him up and down. “You won’t get cold?”

San shrugs, and he takes that as an answer. 

The studio, when they arrive, is absent of Mingi this time - and of Hongjoong, though his voice fills the broad space. 

It’s the first time San has heard his music. It’s the first time he’s heard Hongjoong’s singing, beyond the short verse he'd rapped once over Wooyoung's song choice, but San doesn’t think he could ever mistake that sound for anyone else. There’s such a delicate, almost playful clarity to it, and a powerful charisma. An intriguing curl to his articulation that San hadn’t realised before hearing it without the distraction of Hongjoong himself that has already, in a way, ensnared him into an adoration that is half comfort and half trembling enthusiasm. 

He realises, in realising this, that he has started to love Hongjoong. He doesn’t know at all if it happened the night San had met him and seen how brightly the stars in Seonghwa’s eyes shine upon him, or the day he’d reassured San’s panic with an unaffected sort of understanding, or when he’d seen Hongjoong working with his head resting distractedly on Seonghwa’s lap, or even right now in hearing the product of that work. 

San attaches himself quickly to people, he knows. It still startles him though, sometimes, to see just how quickly it happens.

He sees Wooyoung first, on the stage in front of the mirrors. Acting out a choreo and saying something to Yunho, standing behind him and watching Wooyoung’s reflection, attentive and sharp despite the enthusiasm of his smile, the clarity with which he mimes some of the movements a half-moment late as though he’s following Wooyoung’s lead. 

Wooyoung rises onto his knees, arms folded over his eyes, his back arching and his head almost thrown back, and San can see the way his shirt lifts just a little to bare the slight arch of his hip and he remembers quite suddenly, with an almost heady rush of morbid wonder, the surge of emotion that had risen in him when he’d seen his sharp eyes and the petulant turn of his cheek. 

It doesn’t rise this time, though, as Wooyoung lifts a hand up and then drops it firmly to the floor, swings his legs out to the side and hits each emphatic beat of Hongjoong’s song before surging effortlessly to his feet. It doesn’t just rise in him. It rises and crests and crashes over him, and he’s nearly breathless with an utterance of  _ fuck  _ that he doesn’t let slip past his lips.

Wooyoung stops there, waves vaguely to a student by the sound system who pauses the music, and is already saying, “Like that, do you think?” to Yunho, his voice still pitched loud enough to carry over the suddenly absent sound.

Yunho nods consideringly, and San uproots his feet from where they’ve stopped him by the door. Forces himself to follow Seonghwa inside. 

_ “Oh,”  _ Seonghwa breathes as he comes to lean his hip against the back of one of the lounges, arms folded loosely over his chest to watch the room, “this won’t be good.”

“Why’s that?” San asks, pushing up to sit on the back of the couch beside him.

“This is one of Hongjoong’s songs,” is all Seonghwa says.

“Okay back from the start of that mark, please!” Wooyoung calls out to the student at the desk, and the song skips back to start playing from a place perhaps several bars from where San and Seonghwa had walked in.

San furrows his brow, glances away from where Wooyoung’s leading Yunho through the steps, the two of them more evenly matched this time around, to ask, “Yeah? And?”

“Well,” Seonghwa says, careful as though he’s trying to find a delicate way to phrase it, “this isn’t one I’ve heard before, which means it probably isn’t finished. Which means…” he trails off, gaze distant, and nods towards the door, where San turns his head to see… Hongjoong. Storming in.

Really properly storming, his thunderous expression something that makes even San shrink back a little despite that his furious eyes are set firmly on the laptop plugged into the sound system - his anger a startling oxymoron to the cardboard takeaway cup of coffee in his small, many-ringed hand and the delicate multitude of earrings swinging dangerously with each step.

San almost hears the force with which he slaps his hand against the worn-out spacebar of his computer, but he certainly hears the sudden ring of silence that cuts through Wooyoung and Yunho’s choreography, and he doesn’t think anyone within a kilometre radius escapes the whip crack of his words when he snaps out, voice somehow louder than the music, “Are you  _ kidding me, Jung Wooyoung?” _

“Oops,” the sudden ringing silence carries Yunho’s quiet murmur through the warehouse, “dad’s home.”

_ “When,”  _ Hongjoong seethes, smacking the lid of his laptop down and wrenching the AUX cord out of the port to a loud, concerning crack of the speakers, “will you  _ stop  _ going through my STUFF?”

The student in charge of music, San notices, has scurried off to hide amongst the anonymity of his peers. San inwardly cringes, and silently applauds his foresight. 

“You left your laptop open,” Wooyoung whines, either unaware or completely unconcerned by the murderous intent rolling off Hongjoong in waves, and almost seemingly more put out at having been interrupted at all than by the cause of that interruption.

“So you took that as an invitation to go through my files?” Hongjoong snaps, shoving the laptop in question roughly into his bag. 

Wooyoung, at least, has the grace to exchange a guilty glance with Yunho. “But you should see what we got down for it while you were gone,” he counters, enthusiastic to the point of a death wish.

“I didn’t even write this as a song to be danced to!” Hongjoong points wildly and vaguely in the direction of the sound system. 

“Well, you should,” Wooyoung shrugs, hands deep in his pockets and his shoulders loose and lazy. “It’s sexy.”

“I didn’t write it to be sexy either,” he hisses and, with a shock of amazement, San wonders if Hongjoong is somehow losing this argument.

Wooyoung rolls his eyes. He actually  _ rolls his eyes,  _ and says, “How else am I meant to say it’s really pretty and sentimental without you hitting me?”

So he does have some awareness, then, of the danger he’s currently in. More than that, though, beyond acknowledging it he simply doesn’t seem to care.

“Wooyoung,” Hongjoong articulates, his fury dark and low and defeated, and still unwilling to abate, “I have such a long list of reasons why I would hit you that calling my music sentimental and pretty wouldn’t even make the cut.” There is a warm flush to the tips of Hongjoong’s ears, despite the unrelenting glare he’s levelling at Wooyoung, that tells San it’s probably exactly the thing he’d wanted to hear.

And that’s the wonder of Wooyoung, isn’t it. 

Frustrating, infuriating, and so fucking charming that you can’t do anything about it. 

San wonders if there’s ever really been a corner that Wooyoung has backed himself into that he hasn’t been able to shrug and roll his eyes and pout and compliment and smile his way out of. He doesn’t think it’s likely. It seems in a way as though he’s almost made himself impossible to hate.

“So I  _ can  _ call it sentimental and pretty,” is what Wooyoung takes from that, his petulance blossoming into a sly, pleased smile. All white teeth and narrowed eyes. Somewhere between a promise and a threat. A snake beneath the daisies like he knows exactly that Hongjoong’s inability to scold him only frustrates him all over again.

“You can’t call it  _ anything,”  _ Hongjoong grits, turning his back on Wooyoung’s silent victory to snatch his notebook and pen and headphones from the table and shove them equally as roughly into his bag. “You shouldn’t even be listening to it.”

“Well I did, so…” Wooyoung shrugs again, skipping off the stage to meander closer, happy as you please.

“So that is one of the reasons,” Hongjoong finishes his rhetorical statement for him, thankfully separated by the couch and San and Seonghwa, “above calling it pretty and below scuffing my Doc Martens, that I would hit you.”

“But your music’s  _ good,”  _ Wooyoung whines, and he hasn’t really taken the time to properly acknowledge Seonghwa or San but still steps close, reaches his arms around San’s neck with his eyes still locked on Hongjoong and pitches his weight forward until San almost loses his balance on the back of the couch and his knees close instinctively around Wooyoung’s hips, his hand snapping to Wooyoung’s waist when he flails and struggles not to fall. “Yunho wants to choreograph it and we all know you’re not shy,” Wooyoung continues to speak past San’s ear, his chin hooked lazily over his shoulder. 

“There’s a difference between self esteem and an NDA,” Hongjoong bites back.

“The radio station doesn’t own your music,” San can almost hear Wooyoung rolling his eyes, and pinches his waist to make him shut up. All he gets in return is the blunt shock of Wooyoung’s teeth biting against the collar of his shirt, but when he yelps and jerks away Wooyoung only tightens his hold around him and hooks his chin once more over his shoulder as though it never happened. 

_ “They  _ don’t own my music,” Hongjoong agrees, “but when a company picks me up they’ll want a clean portfolio, and it won’t be very clean if it’s got your hands all over it.”

San can hear Wooyoung’s pout through his considering hum, seeming with no intention to move from where his weight is slumped fully over San as he talks to Hongjoong over his shoulder, and San finds it in him to loop his arms loosely around Wooyoung’s waist and tuck his chin over Wooyoung’s shoulder to mirror him while he listens to their argument simmer into something more of a discussion.

“Why don’t you give it to us, then?” Wooyoung proposes, a sweet, pleading whine in his light voice. “If you want to produce for a big company you gotta have  _ some  _ danceable music. So, Yun can choreograph, we can find some people to dance it, I can film a performance video and you can send the whole thing in.”

Hongjoong’s ensuing silence is, San finds, two thirds of a victory. 

"If we play it right," Wooyoung pushes just a little bit more, "then you could get a job, Yunho might get some commissions, and I can network into filming for some companies. It gives us all an opportunity to move ahead."

San hears Hongjoong’s hesitation, but also hears the crisp tone of professionalism that enters his voice when he says, "Leave it with me."

"Is that a yes?" Wooyoung perks up, lifting his chin off San’s shoulder.

"I said leave it with me," Hongjoong retorts. "It would take a lot to make it work, and I need to figure out if it's worth it. Yun!" he calls out to where Yunho has organised his students back into formation and is catching them up on whatever they'd gone through before Wooyoung had evidently disrupted their class for the opportunity of looting Hongjoong’s working files. "I'm going! Sannie," he rounds the lounge on his way out, bag slung over his shoulder and his coffee-free hand gripping the back of Seonghwa’s jacket, "keep an eye on Young-ah for me. Don't let him get bored; he might commit arson."

"Yessir," San acknowledges, nodding his chin against Wooyoung's shoulder.

Hongjoong’s smile is sweet and lovely, and a little but sly when his eyes dart briefly to where Wooyoung has tucked his face pleasantly against San's neck, but doesn't say anything about it. Just flutters his fingers in something like a wave around his cup and steers Seonghwa towards the door.

And then they're gone, and there is only the heavy beat of music and the scuff and thump of shoes against the wooden stage between Yumho calling out the steps, and Wooyoung melted like a warm semi-liquid against him. Ice cream in the sun dripping down his wrist. He doesn't seem to have any intention of leaving, and San can feel the light stick of sweat in his brow pressed against the side of San’s neck, the steady fan of Wooyoung’s breaths against his collar. 

San pats gently at the small of Wooyoung’s back, allowing a tangential train of thought to indulge in the way Wooyoung’s hips are still caught between his thighs, the way his eyes had caught on the image of Wooyoung’s shirt riding up, the fine arch of his iliac crest.

He wants to trace over it with his fingertips, to find if Wooyoung would tremble against him. 

He doesn’t act on this at all, but he doesn't bother stopping himself from indulging the thought. San knows he has very little control over things like that. 

"You okay?" he asks when a minute has passed and Wooyoung still hasn't left, twining his fingers together to loop around his waist, his chin still resting on Wooyoung's shoulder. His faint exertion smells, San determines, warm and heavy in the manner of anyone's sweat but with something light and sharp and delightful underneath, and San finds himself naming it citrus despite him smelling nothing at all like citrus, really. 

"Very very okay," Wooyoung reassures, still not moving. Melting softer, almost, against San's chest. "You're good to hug."

A quiet laugh pulls from San's chest, tumbles past his lips, and he bundles Wooyoung closer. Something like desire bleeding into his fingertips, but as a desire for nothing more than to keep Wooyoung here. "You can hug me," he finds himself saying, despite that Wooyoung has never struck him as the type to ask with words so much as to read an invitation or dismissal in the subtle articulation of the way someone allows him to come close. "As much as you like."

"I don't think I can," Wooyoung admits, an oxymoron to the way his arms curl closer around San’s shoulders, "because I think I'd like to hug you for a long time, and if I don't stop then I won't go to work, or eat, or even drink water. And then what?" he says, and San can almost feel his smile against his skin. "You'd have to carry me everywhere like a baby."

"You are a baby," San retorts, pinching his waist again. Lightly, this time. "Did you miss me or something?"

Wooyoung hums against him, and San can feel it where they’re pressed chest to chest. "Maybe," he allows, but doesn't seem particularly perturbed either way. Somehow this reassures San. Eases the vague guilt in his chest that had lingered after realising he hadn't thought about Wooyoung for a while, or missed him despite liking him so much. "I think I just like seeing you," he shrugs against San. "A whole lot."

They stay there for a while, San's fingers linked around Wooyoung’s waist and his chin resting over his shoulder, breathing in the warm comfort of being held. It’s different from when Seonghwa hugs him, San finds. There's almost always a reason for that, as sweet as those reasons are. Whether San’s tired, or upset, or if it's been a long day and Seonghwa wants to tell him he did well.

This… Wooyoung doesn't seem to particularly need this long embrace so much as just want it, plain and simple. He seems, more than anything, as forward with his affection as San would like to be if he weren't so worried about exhausting his friends' indulgence. 

It's nice.

It's nice to be held for no reason other than that they want to hold each other. 

It's only when San’s phone buzzes in his pocket that either of them really move, and he doesn’t have any intention of checking it until Wooyoung nudges San’s leg with his thigh and shifts a little, drops a hand from where he’d been tracing a fingertip haphazardly across San’s neck as though mapping freckles, or counting them, to pat at his hip and find his pocket and wiggle his fingers in to extract San’s phone. 

"From… Mars?" he asks, reading the notification over San’s shoulder.

He breathes a laugh and says, "Seonghwa."

"He says did you make that call," Wooyoung recites, and San huffs out a lengthy sigh, drops his brow against Wooyoung’s shoulder.

"Nooooo," he mutters, drawn out and weary. "Can't believe it," he groans, trying to sound sour, "when I tell him I have to do something so he'll remind me, and then he goes and reminds me I haven't done it."

"Outrageous," Wooyoung agrees. "What number do you need?"

"Are you  _ in  _ my phone?" San asks, pulling back a little to see. "I thought you were just reading the lock screen."

"I put in my birthday as a joke," Wooyoung says, flashing the screen towards San, "and it worked."

San furrows his brows, thoroughly confused. "The hell is your birthday?" he asks.

"Twenty-sixth of November," he shrugs.

San closes his eyes on a confused frown, shakes his head. "One-one-two-six was my postcode back home."

"Soulmate behaviour, I think," Wooyoung counters. 

"Use that on Hongjoong next time," San suggests.

"Perfect," Wooyoung says. "If I guess your primary school teacher and your mom's maiden name too, do I win a prize?"

"You get that five dollars in my bank account," San deadpans, "but somehow I don't trust you to call my parents for me."

"Your  _ parents,"  _ Wooyoung practically wriggles when San’s hands move to his hips to lightly usher him just far enough away for San to stand up, and sounds absolutely thrilled at the prospect. "What are they like? Let me guess, let me guess," he says, holding San’s phone defensively against his chest while he thinks. "Your dad is super nice but in a really strict kind of way, and your mom didn't mind when you wandered off as long as you were back before dark. I wanna say…" Wooyoung taps the edge of San’s phone against his pouting lips as he thinks, "you had a pet cat."

San blinks at him, surprised. "Yes," is all he can really say, and Wooyoung’s pout splits into a grin, primly holding out the phone. San squints at him. "You're weird."

"I'm smart," Wooyoung counters. "People-smart. You know, I bet you think you didn't have _heaps_ of friends growing up? But everyone was kind of in love with you and you never really realised it."

"Not so much," San counters, dry, as he takes back his phone.

"Well, you wouldn't think so," Wooyoung reasons. "You never knew Junyoung was kind of in love with you either, and he was  _ pining." _

"I think I just prefer not to think about it," San mutters, looking down at his phone in the hope that the length of his hair might hide the heat of his awkward embarrassment. 

"See, that?" Wooyoung insists, tucking a finger under San's chin and lifting his face. "You're like, super nice but kind of hate when people acknowledge it, and also really pretty and a little bit shy. I bet the people in your school died for that sort of, like, ambivalent niceness."

"It's not ambivalence," San tilts his chin away so he can look back at his phone. "It's polite."

"See?" Wooyoung counters, planting his tattooed hands on the couch by San’s hips, pinning him in. "Like that. It makes people want to chase you," he says, tilting his head to try and meet San’s eyes. "Not many actually do, though."

"People didn't  _ chase  _ me," San tries to laugh, scrolling through his contacts to look for his mother's number.

"You know what I think?" Wooyoung asks, and then pushes on without waiting for an answer. "I think you were always surrounded by people who were at least a little bit in love with you, so you never really learned what to look for."

"Seriously, Woo," San says, amused in his refusal to hear him, and places a hand high on Wooyoung's waist in an attempt to gently usher him out of the way when he stands up from the back of the couch.

"No, seriously." Wooyoung doesn't move, and his hands are still pinning San in and he's rather regretting that he'd stood up now, because they are standing entirely too close and San has no way out. "You probably thought no one ever really had a crush on you, right? And you figured you weren't  _ popular,  _ but you were kind of friends with everyone? The funniest part, actually," Wooyoung leans in, his grin dangerous and dangerously close. "A few people probably did ask you out, but you didn't realise that's what was happening and you went along just thinking it was friend shit."

"Okay," San plants his hand on Wooyoung's chest, steering him backwards, "that's enough reading me for one day." Wooyoung laughs, bright and chiming and clear, and goes willingly - but no further than where San pushes him. "How would you know, anyway?"

"I've been talking to Junyoung," Wooyoung sing-songs. "Mostly about film, but he also kind of doesn't shut up about you."

"So Junyoung psychoanalysed my childhood and told you all about it then," San deadpans.

"Oh, no," Wooyoung shakes his head, "he just told me a couple of stories and I pieced the rest together myself."

San blinks at him. "Were you that bored?" he deadpans.

"As if it’s hard," Wooyoung is still grinning, and tugs almost playfully at the length of San’s hair curling against his neck before stepping properly away, returning San’s space to him. "But I'm surprised it's all right, actually. He's smart, and really skilled too, good eye for film and all that, but he kind of doesn't get people super well, so I figured there'd be some misinformation thrown in."

"What makes you say that?" San arches a brow. 

"Well, he assumed we'd been friends for a few years or so," Wooyoung shrugs, "and I think he kind of, like, isn't in love with you anymore. Sorry," he adds hastily.

"Why are you sorry?" San scowls. "I never even thought he was until you said so."

"Well," Wooyoung hesitates, dragging his thumb over his lower lip and turning his pretty eyes up towards the ceiling, "the reason is a bit… somewhat to do with I think he might have somehow gotten the impression that we've also been dating for a few years. Maybe."

San's eyes widen, a sudden rush dropping into the pit of his stomach, and all he can think of to say is, "I quite literally kicked you. Off the couch. Onto the ground."

"Yeah," Wooyoung shoots him a sour glance from the corner of his eye, "you  _ did. _ And he kinda said something like,  _ Oh you must be really close Sannie never tells anyone when they've upset him but he actually snapped at you,  _ and I was like  _ Oh wow lucky me," _ he half-mocks.

"And he didn't just assume I couldn't stand you," San states, disbelief warring with an almost hysterical instinct to laugh.

Wooyoung raises his hands, helplessly shakes his head. "I didn't say anything! And he kind of didn't say anything outright, and I didn't wanna be whatever the reverse of  _ I have a boyfriend  _ is, so I just kind of. Left it alone. I'm sure it's harmless."

San squints at Wooyoung, struggling and absolutely failing to figure him out. "And you’re just…fine with that."

Wooyoung pins him with an odd look for a moment before saying, "I think you haven't really been listening to anything I've said."

"I heard the part where you stole my phone, and then my little brother, and then dissected my whole childhood," San retorts. "What did I miss?"

"Nuance, I think," Wooyoung answers. 

"I didn't realise subtly was your forte," San mocks.

"I feel like a twelve-year-old," Wooyoung rubs between his brows. "Are you stupid, or just playing dumb?"

San pauses, and genuinely gives an effort at thinking about what Wooyoung is going to such convoluted lengths to avoid saying. "Stupid, probably," he admits when he comes up with nothing.

"Of course you are," Wooyoung huffs out a heavy sigh, drags his fingers back through his hair to scrape it into half a ponytail and tie it with an elastic around his wrist. "Go make your call, Sannie."

San narrows his eyes at Wooyoung, trying to place his attitude on the scale of irritation from genuine to performative. "Are you pissed?"

"No," Wooyoung scoffs half a laugh. "It's kinda funny."

San considers him for another long moment before allowing, "If you say so." He watches Wooyoung turn, watches him raise his arms above his head in a lax, catlike stretch, his face tilted up to the ceiling and his back arching. His shirt lifting, but not high enough to show that flash of warm skin. 

The snake coils up his bare arm, the sleek length of it disappearing into a tangle of roses that bloom across his skin, foliage shifting over the subtle flex of his arms. 

Maybe he should have asked Wooyoung to call his parents, after all. Not to speak to them, really, so much as to take the reluctance from San’s hands as he hesitates to call them. He goes to the table, waterfalls a drink from someone’s bottle before putting it back, holding the water in his mouth for a long moment while he looks down at his mother’s contact, thumb pressed to the screen to keep it from going dark. 

He swallows slowly, bit by bit, and tries to think of what he’s trying to say to her. 

Nothing comes to mind, and he drops to slump into the old leather couch. Maybe the music’s too loud in the studio, and he should wait until he leaves. 

He jabs his thumb at the contact to call her more on instinct than anything, because if he allows himself to keep thinking about it then he knows, he knows he’ll never get it done. And the guilt will continue to eat at him. 

One arm folded over his chest, the other pressing his phone to his ear, he hears it ring three times and hopes she’ll miss the call. 

_ “San-ah?” _

An awkward smile that he’s glad she can’t see pinches onto his face, and he breathes a tight laugh into the phone. “Hi, ma.”

_ “Are you out?”  _ she asks and sounds cautious of him, cautious of the music that is, San decides, too loud as a background for this call. 

“No,” he says, pushing himself out of the lounge and making for the door, feeling Wooyoung’s eyes trailing after him from beside the sound system but reluctantly, almost shamefully refusing to meet them. “No, I’m at Yunho’s studio. He’s teaching a class now.”

The sound dims outside the broad doors, if only a little, and San slows his steps. Meanders towards the far corner of the building with his eyes on the path right beneath his feet, his arm once more tucked over his chest. 

_ “Do you need something?”  _ she asks next, still a slight pitch of concern in the call-muffled quality of her voice.  _ “Why did you call?” _

“Nothing,” San mumbles and wants to look up at the sky to see what quality of blue it might be at this time of day, but can’t bring himself to lift his gaze from his feet. “I just missed you.” He kicks his heel against a rock, watches it tumble across the path, and misses Wooyoung. “I haven’t called in a while,” he says, his words pitching quieter. Guilt and apology churning within him. “I’m sorry.”

His mother is silent for a moment, and when she speaks next she doesn’t say  _ It’s alright,  _ but her voice has that high, placating pitch that has always bothered San’s independence and his pride, because it’s the way she had probably spoken to him as a child but she’d never quite seen enough of him growing up to grow out of talking like that when he grew out of hearing it.  _ “You’ve been busy, right?”  _ she offers him a ready excuse.  _ “I don’t mind if you don’t call every day. I’m just happy to hear your voice.” _

He should love her a lot more than this, right? He should, to be a better son. 

And he  _ does  _ love her, he knows. But he doesn’t love her as much as she loves him, and he feels awful for it. 

“Yeah,” he breathes on a tense laugh, and wonders if she will ask him what’s been keeping him busy. 

_ “Everyone misses you here, San-ah,”  _ she says, and he tries not to be disappointed.  _ “When will you come back to visit?” _

“I don’t know,” he admits, and looks up to find he’s reached the edge of the warehouse. He presses his back to the corrugated iron wall, slides down to crouch against it and pulls his phone from his ear to put on speaker as he says, “I’ll be busy up until October, and then maybe a day after the performance to rest before we start work on the end-of-year shows.”

He wonders if she will ask what performance, or what shows. 

_ “You won’t be working over Chuseok though,”  _ she says, and he’s glad the quality of the speakerphone distorts most of whatever tone he might find in her voice. 

“I have to,” he says, dropping his head to rest on his knees. “I can’t take three days off so close to the gala,” he reasons, eyes closed. Quieter, he says again, “I’m sorry.”

Her silence stretches long on the thin line between them, and eventually she says,  _ “It could just be one day, though.” _

His lips twist, conflicted and guilty. “Maybe.”

_ “You could bring Yunho,”  _ she entices, as though he is still a six-year-old reluctant to socialise,  _ “or Hwaseong.” _

“Seonghwa,” he corrects for maybe the third time, knowing she will always continue to get it wrong. “They have their own families to see.”

“Sannie!” he hears Wooyoung’s sharp, unforgettable voice chime over the silence and he lifts his head, snaps around to see him trotting down the path with his tattooed arms barely fitted into the sleeves of a denim jacket, all black and bright yellow that San only realises after a moment are marigolds. “Why’d you come all the way out here? You’re gonna get cold.”

“Ah,” San quickly lowers his eyes back to his phone, untucks one arm from his chest to touch the screen and make it light up, “mom, Wooyoung is here.”

_ “Wooyoung?”  _ She articulates his name strangely, as though testing it out, and San catches Wooyoung’s apologetic grimace as he matches San to slide down the wall and crouch beside him, his warm shoulder pressed to San’s.  _ “Is that your new friend?” _

San arches a brow at Wooyoung and he spreads his hands in return, mouths  _ I don’t know  _ before San presses his elbow against Wooyoung’s ribs and nods towards the phone. 

“Hello, Missus Choi,” he says brightly before the silence can drag too long, nudging San back. “I’m Wooyoung, a friend of Sannie’s. It’s lovely to meet you!”

San shoots him a look, mouths  _ It’s lovely to meet you?  _ at Wooyoung in disbelief. 

Wooyoung gives a desperate shrug, shakes his head.  _ I panicked! _

_ “So polite,” _ her laugh crackles through the phone’s speaker.  _ “Wooyoung-ah, would you be able to convince my son to come visit for the holidays?” _

_ “Sannie,”  _ Wooyoung gasps dramatically beside him, “You’re not going home for the holidays?” San drops his head back heavily against the wall behind him. “I’ll try my best, Missus Choi.”

_ “Thank you, Wooyoung-ah,”  _ she laughs again, and San wonders almost jealously if she might start to like Wooyoung more than him.  _ “I can’t believe I had to hear about you from Junyoung-ah first.” _ The glance San shares with Wooyoung this time is markedly more panicked, mirrored in Wooyoung’s expression.  _ “I’m glad he’s found such good friends in Seoul.” _

Wooyoung forces a laugh, a nervous edge to it, and says, “You raised a good son, Missus Choi. I’m glad I got the chance to meet him.”

“What did Junyoung say?” San forces himself to ask, dread carving a pit in his stomach. 

Her hum comes muffled through the phone and she says,  _ “He told us Wooyoung helped with his application. And that he puts up well with your moods,”  _ she adds, amusement clear in her voice, and San tries to let the tension drain from him. It doesn’t entirely work.  _ “Don’t bother him too much, or you’ll chase him off.” _

“Yeah, mom,” San sighs, looking up at the sky. It’s turned a washed-out dark blue, the sun already gone below the horizon. 

_ “Really, San-ah,”  _ she says, and he knows she’s trying to sound gentle.  _ “When you have good friends, you need to treat them well.” _

“I know,” he murmurs without looking away from the steadily darkening sky. 

“I have to go back to my class, but it was lovely to meet you Missus Choi,” Wooyoung says, leaning close to the phone resting on San’s knees. 

_ “Okay,”  _ his mother allows,  _ “I’ll let you both go. But San, you should call more. We miss you.” _

His eyes fall closed and he wishes he could just nod and say nothing at all. “I’ll try,” he lies instead.

_ “Have a good night San, Wooyoung-ah.” _

“You too, Missus Choi,” Wooyoung says into San’s silence, and reaches out to end the call when San doesn’t unfold his arms from against his chest. They sit without speaking for a long moment, San unwilling to say a word and Wooyoung fidgeting beside him. “I don’t think Junyoung said anything,” he says at length, and San answers only with a vague hum. 

The silence settles over them again, thick and discomforted. 

At last Wooyoung tries again, says quietly, “I don’t think she meant it like that.”

“Probably not,” San allows, still not opening his eyes. “But she always says it. Every time.”

A sigh blows past Wooyoung’s lips and he hangs an arm around San’s shoulders, cradles his head and pulls him to rest against Wooyoung’s warm shoulder. “I do put up with your moods well, you know,” he tries to joke. And then, gently, “You’re not a burden to your friends, Sannie. You take care of us just as well as we take care of you, and that’s how it should be.”

San shivers, a little, against the warmth of Wooyoung’s side. The cold bites at all the places he isn’t touching. “I hope so,” he whispers. Tries not to think too dearly of Wooyoung calling himself San’s friend.

“You don’t know,” he feels Wooyoung shake his head. “The number of times Yeosang said you helped them out even though they make it hard, and the way Seonghwa and Yunho talk about you when you’re not here. Like you’re the kindest person in the world. I don’t wanna make you feel awkward or anything,” he says, “but they really love you, you know? Anyone lucky enough to know you would love you.”

“Do you love me too, then?” San tries to joke. 

Wooyoung huffs, and winds both his arms around San’s shoulders. Envelops him in warmth. “More than you’d like, probably.”

San laughs, a little too adoringly, and curls his fingers into the smooth denim of Wooyoung’s jacket. “I don’t think that’s possible,” he admits quietly, just below his breath, into the space of warmth beneath Wooyoung’s jaw. 

He wonders if Wooyoung hears him. 


	8. armand

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!
> 
> nearly 100 kudos.....i will cry thank u guys so much!!! and thank u for all the comments you've been leaving too, theyve really been highlighting my days through these busy weeks!!
> 
> in return for all your appreciation i offer: more woosan, and a long overdue scene with yunho!!!!

Wooyoung hadn’t gone back to work right then, despite what he’d told San’s mother. San kind of knew that it would be something of a lie even as he’d said it, an excuse to end the call as quickly as he could see San sinking into his agitation, but it still settles warm and comforted in him when Wooyoung hugs him until he shivers again in the encroaching cold of night. 

Then he rubs San’s back, stands up, and reaches out a hand to pull him up from the dirt of the sidewalk. 

“You really should have worn something warmer,” he tries to scold, but San shrugs a little, twines their fingers together where Wooyoung hasn’t let go of his hand. 

“That’s what I have you for, isn’t it?”

Wooyoung snorts a laugh. “Smooth.” 

Something about _This is probably why Junyoung thinks we’re dating_ sits on the tip of San’s tongue, but he doesn’t say it. 

“This is probably why Junyoung thinks we’re dating,” Wooyoung comments, his laughter bright and chiming and sweet, and swings their hands playfully as they walk.

San rolls his eyes. “So you can hug me for ten minutes and no-one says a word, but the second I make a joke I’m the reason he thinks we’re in love,” he observes.

“Hey,” Wooyoung retorts, “I hug all my friends for ten minutes, at least.”

“And I trust all my friends to keep me warm when I forget a coat,” San rolls his eyes. “You’re not special.”

“Seonghwa,” Wooyoung whines pitifully to the sky, “Sannie’s picking on me again!”

“Hwa won’t save you now,” San threatens, squeezing his fingers lightly around Wooyoung’s. 

“Did you actually get paid this week, though, or do you really only have five dollars?” Wooyoung asks next, San bumping against his shoulder when he expects them to turn into the studio when they cross into the warm golden light that’s pooling across the road.

“I got paid,” San admits. “I was trying to throw you off the scent.”

“Well, you still owe me dinner,” Wooyoung reminds. 

San furrows his brow and says, “I thought I owed you breakfast.”

“But I’m hungry _now,”_ he pouts, pressing against San’s side and dropping his head to his shoulder, burrowing in against his neck. “Are you gonna let me _starve?”_

“Don’t you have a class to teach?” San reminds, nudging Wooyoung with his shoulder.

“Not ‘til Yunho’s done,” he says.

“And warmup…?”

“I’m already warm,” Wooyoung insists, and drops San’s hand to drape his arm around his neck as though to prove that point. “And you can teach me barre or something after, to make sure.”

“I’ll teach you barre now,” San counters, “but I’m not taking you to dinner twenty minutes before you need to teach choreography for an hour. You’ll make yourself sick.” Wooyoung leans back from him, his arm still around San’s shoulders, just enough to look at him. Halfway between accusing and appraising. “What?” San asks.

Wooyoung pauses for a moment, and then admits, “I don’t know,” with a strange consideration to his tone. It’s a little bit funny, San finds, to have him at such a loss.

“What,” he laughs, nudging Wooyoung towards the studio, “no-one’s ever told you no before?”

“I don’t think so,” Wooyoung admits. “Not for fun stuff.”

“Not even Hongjoong?” San winds his arm around Wooyoung’s waist to steer him inside.

“That’s different,” he defends. “Hongjoong _says_ no, but he still does it.”

“Maybe you should call me, then,” San counters, “instead of just waiting for me to turn up to your work so you can extort me for all the money I don’t make.”

“Somehow I expected a ballet dancer to be, like. At least a _little_ rich,” Wooyoung admits, willing to let himself be steered into the studio, the heavy fibres of the overhead lights warming the air with their yellow light and the up-tempo beat of Yunho’s enthusiastic class warming San’s fingertips and toes. “Isn’t Seonghwa kinda loaded?”

“Seonghwa is a principal dancer,” San says, untucking the button-up from the waist of his pants and lifting it over his head. “He can afford to be loaded as soon as he’s done paying off his surgery.”

“What surgery?”

Has San said too much? He doesn’t know. Seonghwa doesn’t hide the fact so much as he’s reluctant to talk about it, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s San’s place to say. But Wooyoung, as with every time San has let something slip, has a keen intensity threaded through his airy question. He _wants_ to know and San doesn’t doubt that he could refuse Wooyoung if he needed to, but he does doubt that Wooyoung’s determination to pull an answer from him would be worth standing against unless it were something that truly needed to be hidden from him. 

“He hurt his leg,” San says vaguely, and hopes ambivalently, “and went to hospital for a bit. He was in physio for about four months before he was well enough to start dancing properly,” he admits, stretching his arms over his head with his back turned to Wooyoung, and reaching down to brush the palms of his hands against the smooth concrete floor, “and then another six months before he could audition for principal again.”

Wooyoung gives a low whistle and meanders around San to toss his jacket onto one of the couches. “I knew he was taking time off when he met Yun,” he admits, interlocking his tattooed fingers and stretching his arms out before him, “but I didn’t think it was, like. _Serious,_ you know?”

San shrugs, keeps his eyes low from Wooyoung’s. Knows there will be something telling in them - knows that Wooyoung might very well read it anyway, in the way San avoids his gaze. Guilt, and the thread of lies he’d been telling Seonghwa. “I didn’t know him then,” is what San says, pulling one of the chairs pushed up to the table out for Wooyoung, and another for himself. “But he’s really careful,” he says, “about overworking, and all that.”

Wooyoung is silent for a moment, one hand resting lazily on the back of the chair and the other placed on his cocked hip. “Let me guess,” he comments. “His health concerns are making it real hard for you to dance yourself to death.”

“What makes you think I overwork?” San asks rather than answer, poking Wooyoung’s hip to right his posture, drawing his fingers lightly across the stretch cotton of his shirt between his shoulder blades, saying, “Pull here,” and watches as his body opens naturally to the command, his core taut and his neck long. 

“I just think that you were maybe a little more distraught than the average ballerina at the idea of getting cast in a main role.”

“Danseur,” San corrects, his hands hesitating a moment, hanging nervous in the air with the slightest tremor in his fingertips before they settle on Wooyoung’s hips, fingers curled around the arch of his iliac crest when he guides Wooyoung to tilt them forward to strengthen his line, straighten the natural curve of his spine. 

The scrape of fabric catches against his fingertips when he draws his hands away, a sensitivity burning his skin and trembling up his forearms. He clenches his fists and then shakes them out as he steps back to look at Wooyoung’s posture, trying to rid himself of the feeling. Halfway between itchy and ticklish. Pins and needles prickling under his skin, and he kind of wants to feel it all over his whole body until the sensation overwhelms him and he has to shed his too-small skin like a serpent, new scales shiny and warm and soft to the touch. 

“But you _were_ upset,” Wooyoung presses, holding his posture well with one hand resting lightly on the back of the chair. The snake shifts over the tense flex of his arm, and San knows it’s difficult to hold. Every muscle, it seems, active and sharp. 

“Yeah, I was upset,” he mutters, jabbing a finger against Wooyoung’s hip and saying, “Squeeze. I’m still upset, actually, so don’t push your luck or I might make you dance Balanchine.”

“Squeeze what?” Wooyoung huffs. “Everything is squeezed.”

“Your ass,” San rolls his eyes. “Put your leg out to the side and squeeze.”

“Oh, wow,” he comments when he follows San’s command and ends up in tendu a la seconde, the flex of his body naturally pushing his leg to turn out. “Didn’t know it did that.”

“Keep your glutes tight even in position,” San says, nudging his foot against Wooyoung’s to usher it back in underneath him. “You need to turn out from the hip down; if you try it from the floor up you’re gonna fuck your ankles and knees and hips, and maybe your back too, just for fun.”

“Ballet is an extreme sport,” Wooyoung concludes, extending his other leg to find the same turnout before returning to a position more or less like third. “Is this why you have no ass?”

San snorts a laugh, rolls his eyes. “Sure,” he mocks, “I have no ass.”

“No, really,” Wooyoung insists. “You’d think those jeans would tell no lie, but there is nearly nothing to see.”

“Hey,” San defends, swinging the back of his chair around so he can mirror Wooyoung’s position and mark him, “I had to jump _twice_ to get into these.”

“Only twice,” Wooyoung tuts, sighs. “I guess no-one’s perfect.”

“My fatal flaw,” San acknowledges, dry. “Whenever you change position at barre,” he says, sliding his working leg out of third, the gesture turned awkward from the reluctance of his Vans’ sole to arch, “tendu into second position. This is first,” he says, his feet in line, “second,” he takes his working leg out to the side, “third devant,” he slides his working foot in front, halfway crossed over his supporting leg, “and third derriere,” he finishes, brushing his leg out and quickly tucking it back in, this time behind. 

“I thought there were five,” Wooyoung says, following San’s movements smoothly, careful of his turnout.

“There are,” San admits, “but I don’t want you to twist your ankle on fifth,” he says, sliding his feet into third and then further, until they are completely parallel heel to toe, “and fourth is an active position,” he adds, brushing his working leg forward and settling into the step. “This is how you’d prepare for pirouette,” he explains, and smoothly adds, “which we’re not doing,” the moment he sees Wooyoung open his mouth.

Wooyoung closes his mouth, pouts. “So what _are_ we doing?” he says.

“First, plie,” San returns to first position, watches Wooyoung do the same and nods at his line. A little rigid, but he’s holding the tension well. “How’s your arm-leg coordination?” he asks.

“Amazing,” Wooyoung answers plainly.

“Port-de-bras too, then,” he adds, articulating his free arm firm and smooth before him. “Shoulders down,” he reminds Wooyoung, “elbow higher. Round. Like there’s water running down your arm, and you want it to drip off your fingertip,” he suggests, watching Wooyoung settle into it. He’s a responsive learner, absolutely. The kind that makes San wonder if he might ever open a studio once he leaves the professional circuit. 

“Why is everything so tense?” he whines, trying to soften the sharp angle of his elbow without lifting his shoulder. “How do you even move like this?”

“You’ll see,” San laughs, and nods at Wooyoung’s position. “Good. We’ll do two demi plie and one grand in first, then change position. Right? Heels down,” he says as he bends his knees, sinks into the movement, “port-de-bras second,” he explains, his working arm gesturing out to the side, “and then up. Arm back to first.”

“Heels _down,”_ Wooyoung huffs like it’s a question, wobbling a little as he follows. “How low do I go?”

San shrugs. “As low as you can, like that. Keep your hips forward,” he adds when he sees Wooyoung’s line waver. “Again,” he says, lowering into demi plie, “port-de-bras forth,” he raises his arm over his head, “out to second when you rise,” he settles it outward, “and then back to first on grand plie,” he explains as he lowers deeper this time, his heels finally lifting from the ground. 

“Heels up on that one?” Wooyoung checks.

“Heels up,” he nods.

“Thank fuck. How do you make it look so pretty?” he demands, eyes following San as he presses his tendu out to second.

“I’ve done this every morning since I was fifteen,” he says, nodding to Wooyoung’s second position and beginning the same series of plie and port-de-bras. “Somewhere along the line I started doing well.”

“Doing well,” Wooyoung scoffs beneath his breath, subtly discomforted in this position but dutifully following San’s cues. “If you look this good doing static shit, I think I might die if I see you dance.”

“Heels down in second,” San adds when he watches Wooyoung sink into grand plie.

“Heels up, heels down,” Wooyoung scoffs. “My quads are about to give out.”

“Good,” San says, ambivalent. “That means you’re doing it right,” he passes a tendu into third. 

“Are your thighs like rocks?” Wooyoung groans, but still dutifully follows San through the plie. “How did you get into this?”

“I wanted to try it,” he says, falling into third devant and plie, watching Wooyoung’s line, “and mom didn’t really mind. And then my teacher wanted to send me to a real school, instead of some studio in Namhae, and my grandparents agreed. My dad said only if I finished high school first.” 

He lifts his arm into fourth, slides his foot forward into a tendu once, twice, holds it out on the third and lifts his foot from where it’s barely resting on the floor into a pique before bringing it back, watching Wooyoung watch him and copy the gesture almost flawlessly before San stretches his arm to second and repeats the movement. 

“So I went to school four days a week, then my grandparents would take me to Seoul and I’d train for three days, and then go back. And then I graduated,” he shrugs, allows himself to be surprised when Wooyoung catches the subtlety of San shifting his foot behind, in front, behind on each close. “Moved here, studied pre-professional full time and auditioned to join the corps. I met Seonghwa a year later,” he adds, tendu to derriere, arm in arabesque, “when he was first contracted as principal for _Manon.”_ He breathes a laugh, shakes his head. “You ever see someone dance, just once, and fall a little bit in love?”

“I’ve only seen Seonghwa dance what Yunho teaches him when they’re both bored enough to try,” Wooyoung says, as though trying to imply either that he somehow isn’t in love with Seonghwa or that he has never seen him dance. Knowing Seonghwa, and knowing what he knows of Wooyoung, San is more inclined to think it’s the second one. 

“Now turn around,” San instructs as they close into third, his hand dropping absently from the back of his chair, knowing there won’t be much use to him continuing if Wooyoung has his back turned and no mirrors ready to let him see San regardless. “Same thing on the other side,” he says as he meanders over, swinging a leg over the chair Wooyoung is using as his barre and sitting on it backwards. 

“This is actually fucking hard,” Wooyoung admits as he turns around, his other hand resting lightly on the chair’s back. “Why are my _shoulders_ tired?”

“Shitty posture?” San shrugs, entranced in a subtle glance at the tattoos on his hand now, the closest he’s ever been to them he thinks, while Wooyoung rearranges his body. It’s the eye, staring up at him from Wooyoung’s warm skin. 

There’s something reflected in the greyscale iris, and he wants to lean closer. He wants to look into it, and see what it’s seeing. What things Wooyoung captures in this aggressively passive stare, what he might look at with such quiet ambivalence. 

“Is this right?” he asks, and San tears his eyes away. 

“Why are you standing like a slut?” he snorts a laugh. “Tuck your hips in.”

“I have a back condition,” Wooyoung mutters without heat, but curls his hips inward to strengthen his line. “This still feels super awkward.”

“You get used to it,” San says. 

“Is that what you do?” Wooyoung asks as he begins. “Just… get used to things?”

“If I like it this much,” San admits, “I think it’s less like that and more like enjoying even the difficulties.”

“And if you don’t?” Wooyoung pushes.

“If I don’t like it,” San breathes a laugh, “then I don’t really stick around long enough to find out what happens next. I’d lose interest too quickly for that.”

“But you’re still here,” Wooyoung says, and San thinks for a moment that maybe they aren’t talking about ballet anymore. 

He rests his elbows on the back of the chair, cups his chin in his hands. Eyes on Wooyoung’s turnout, the liquid flow of his working leg moving against his loose pants. He makes these plain, easy movements look like waves lapping against the shore. “Yeah,” he considers and thinks about how somehow, despite leaving Namhae behind, the ocean has seemed to find its way back to him. “I’m still here.”

* * *

They don’t get much further than developpe before Wooyoung’s class starts filtering in, but it’s enough that San doesn’t have any concerns about him dancing on cold muscles. 

“Don’t worry about how high you can lift,” he’s saying without much thought, drawing his working leg up before extending it at a low angle - less than sixty degrees from his hip to the floor, surely. “Barre is where you warm up; you don’t want to overwork yourself here.”

“Wait,” Wooyoung struggles for a moment, eyes flicking quickly between his own extension and San’s, “wait what do you mean how high?”

San hesitates a moment before lowering his working leg, sliding it carefully back beneath him. “You know,” he hesitates, “developpe is _that_ one.”

“What one?” a frown scuffs Wooyoung’s brow. 

The one that can make or break a Phrygia role and had San speechless in the hall when he’d seen Minyoung perform, and Seonghwa too, and likely anyone else who’d chanced to see it. “Like,” he raises his knee to his chest a la seconde and extends - not as high as he can go, but high enough that his his jeans start to protest and high enough that his body thrills at the gentle strain of it and high enough that Wooyoung’s eyes go wide and he almost drops his posture.

“Okay what the _fuck,”_ he demands. “How did you do that?”

“Practice,” San shrugs, lowering it smoothly and bringing it back in. “Flexibility, I guess.”

“Look, I can do the splits just fine,” Wooyoung emphasises, “but I can’t lift my whole leg over my head without some help from, like, another limb at least. You know the monkey instinct?” he says, eyes intense on San’s thighs, “where you see something that looks like it might be food and your brain tells you to bite it?”

San arches a brow. “Didn’t know monkeys had an instinct towards cannibalism.”

“I’m going to eat you,” Wooyoung threatens, glaring at him. 

“Would your students appreciate your act of violence?” San asks, glancing around Wooyoung to where Yunho’s class has stepped down from the stage, weary and jovial, to make room for Wooyoung’s. 

"They've seen me do worse," Wooyoung promises. 

San squints. Glances between Wooyoung and his class. "Are you _sure?"_ he emphasises.

Wooyoung purses his lips. "Okay maybe not _literally_ eating someone. But metaphorically, sure."

"What could that possibly be a metaphor for," San states.

"Use your imagination, Sannie," he articulates, turning on his heel and walking all of three steps towards his class before he spins on his heel, races back towards San and tossing his arms around his neck and saying, "Thank you for teaching me ballet! I still don’t really get it but it's super pretty."

"It's enough that it's pretty," San admits, a laugh threaded through his words as he pats Wooyoung’s back. He’s on the verge of taunting that now Wooyoung might owe him a dance class, but something stills him. An echo of the embarrassment and stress that has been chasing his heels throughout the week, the delicate, insecure pride he has as a dancer.

As a _professional_ dancer, as someone who dances as a career path. The notion that he isn’t talented so much as hardworking sits like a small stone of anxiety lodged in his throat, silencing the half-joke before he can make it. He _wants_ to dance, but he doesn’t want to dance poorly. He doesn’t want to be introduced to Wooyoung’s students as the ballet soloist who trips over his own feet if he doesn’t know beforehand exactly where he should place them. 

He doesn’t want to learn from Wooyoung, if it will mean showing him anything less than San’s absolute best. 

“I won’t eat you just yet,” Wooyoung says as he pulls away, shoots a wink like a threat and a smile like a promise when he adds, “but soon!” and dashes away once more towards his students. 

San rolls his eyes, but watches him go. A forlorn sort of self-patronising guilt swirling low in his chest when he thinks it really would be so easy to join Wooyoung’s class if only he didn’t care so much about how people might see him if they’re to see him be less than perfect. 

Better to simply not, he reluctantly supposes as he slides their chairs back to the table, and to preserve the idea Wooyoung seems to have of San being a talented dancer. 

His body aches to practice, blood thrumming in his veins at the Pavlovian promise of barre. Every part of him, now, expects him to fall into Albrecht’s starting position. 

“Hey Yun,” he calls out instead, hailing Yunho from where he’s sipping at a bottle of water, “are you free?”

“What are you doing here?” Yunho asks, genial and not unkindly, while he pulls at the collar of his shirt to dry the sweat from his brow and cheeks. 

“Seonghwa was coming to pick Hongjoong up for a date,” he shrugs, worming his phone out of his back pocket. 

“And…?” Yunho arches a brow.

“And I didn’t want to be home alone bored out of my brain,” San rolls his eyes. Yunho makes a sound as though he understands - not whatever excuses San is giving, quite clearly, but that until a week ago he’d rarely had any trouble at all being home alone and finding something towards which he can direct his boredom. He’s infuriating. San adores him. “Think you can monitor ballet?” he asks rather than allow Yunho the opportunity to say anything about it.

“I think I can try,” he agrees, placing his bottle on the table by San and leaning his hip against it. “You having trouble?”

He considers lying, for all of half a moment. _No,_ he thinks about saying, _I just want a second opinion._ But Yunho more than anyone has always had a keen ear for San’s flippancies and he knows he’d barely get through the first word before that keen-eyed kindness will be looking him up and down once and then away; seeing his faults and then letting them slide. “A bit,” he says instead, and it’s easier to admit to Yunho than it would be to anyone else, because Yunho doesn’t think of San as some prodigal genius of dance and he knows better than anyone - better even than Seonghwa, he thinks - how earnestly and fundamentally San fights with himself in his determination to rise above his shortcomings. “I can’t really place it,” he admits, opening an email attachment sent by the choreographer. “I could use your eyes.”

“And my big brain too,” Yunho readily adds.

“Enormous,” San grins, tilting his phone as the video loads and scrubbing through to the pre-recording of Apollo’s solo from the NYCB. 

“Is there context?” Yunho asks, leaning close to San’s shoulder and supporting the phone with one hand, peering down at the small screen.

“It’s the birth of Apollo,” San says, lifting it closer to their faces and angling it for Yunho to have a better view. “Learning the arts of poetry, mime, and song and dance from the three muses, and then mastering them, and then ascending to Olympus.”

“Mastering the muses, or mastering the arts?” Yunho asks, eyes keen on the choreography. It isn’t a throwaway question, San can tell; it’s warm and considering. 

“Both, in a way,” he considers. “The muses are a manifestation of the arts, so mastering the arts means mastering the muses.”

“So, the student becomes the teacher?” Yunho half-laughs, but his attention hasn’t wavered from the screen even for a moment. 

“Something like that,” San agrees, amusement curling his voice, settling in the corners of his lips. 

“And he’s like a baby,” Yunho says, watching the awkward turns of Apollo’s movements. “I mean,” he allows, gesturing vaguely to the statuesque musculature of the danseur, “obviously not, but he was just born, right? He’s got no idea.”

“Yeah,” San confirms, wrinkling his nose. “It’s kinda ugly.”

“You ever seen a newborn?” Yunho snorts a laugh. “They’re all squished and floppy.”

“I guess that’s one way to describe this choreography,” he allows, dry. “Squished and floppy.”

“Psychoanalysis isn’t really my specialty,” Yunho says, a tone of consideration firming the warm amusement in his voice without dispersing it completely, “but dance analysis kind of is, and this is _good._ I know you don’t seem to think so,” he adds before San can say a word, shooting him a quick glance and a light smile, “but you wanted my opinion, and I think my opinion is that you might be too busy looking at all the things it isn’t, from a classical perspective, instead of picking out all the things it is as a narrative.”

“Ballet has a narrative,” San huffs, tension lifting in his shoulders. “Plenty of ballets have narratives - really intricate, messy ones that don’t need gross choreo to describe gross things.”

Yunho arches a brow. “Are you gonna look me in the eye and tell me _Mayerling_ doesn’t have gross choreo?”

 _“Mayerling_ is fundamentally disturbing,” San challenges, heat rising in his tone and his voice twisting into a pout, “but it’s still _elegant._ Even when it’s being gross.”

“I’m just saying,” Yunho defends, trying valiantly to steer the conversation back towards _Apollo,_ “this choreography makes perfect sense to me, and suits the story well. You can’t take a neoclassical work, look at it through a classical lens and call it bad!”

“Well maybe I just don’t get it, then,” San scowls.

“We both know you don’t get it!” Yunho spreads his hands in an act of helpless defence. “That’s why you asked me for help!”

“So I’m beyond help,” San folds his arms over his chest, stubbornly turns his glare across the room where Wooyoung is running his class through whatever dance they’re working on.

“Don’t take my words out of context,” Yunho scolds, but never once has his attitude towards San turned cold, and he lightly bumps his shoulder against San. He lets it sway him, but doesn’t shift his tense posture. “You need to broaden your perspective. You’re not gonna figure the dance out if you keep patronising it like this.”

“I’m being patronising, now?” San articulates, his lips pursed, eyes not even flicking in Yunho’s direction. 

“You’re being a bit condescending, yeah,” Yunho admits. San hears him take a deep breath, sees him rub at his brow from the periphery of his vision. “Look,” he says, “you don’t have to like it. You don’t even have to enjoy it. But you need to understand it, if you want to do it well.”

San feels his lips twitch into a pout, blinks stubbornly towards the stage. 

“Sannie,” Yunho sighs, nearly pleads, dropping his sweaty head onto San’s shoulder and turning it back and forth, shoving against him. “Stop it.”

“Stop what,” he articulates, unwavering. “I’m not doing anything.”

“Stop looking like I just kicked your puppy,” he complains, and there’s something about this overlarge man nudging his head against San’s shoulder, looking very much like the puppy that has been kicked, that is so incongruously affectionate to San that he sighs, shrugs Yunho off him and unfolds his arms, places his hands against the edge of the table behind him and lets himself be apologetic. 

“You’re probably right,” he admits, but still won’t look Yunho in the eye.

“I usually am,” he says, ruffling a reassuring hand through San’s hair, “but sometimes I’m not, so allow for some margin of error.”

“I don’t even know where to begin,” he lowers his eyes to the floor, feeling his pout deepen and having no inclination to fix it. “I’ve never had to think about it.”

“At the end of the day,” Yunho says, “it’s a new experience. And it might suck,” he admits, “but you’ll still learn something from it, for sure.”

“I don’t wanna learn,” he scowls. “I don’t wanna think. I just want to be stupid.”

“Life would be a lot easier if you were stupid,” Yunho agrees, “but unfortunately for you, your brain is too big for your head, and wrinkly like a walnut, and I don’t think it’s possible for you to not think at all, so I guess you’re just gonna have to keep working hard and doing better, because we both know the things that huge wrinkly brain will do to you if you stagnate.”

“You have such a way with words,” San states, bland.

“I think Hongjoong should hire me as a lyricist or something,” Yunho agrees, draping his long arm around San’s shoulder and pulling him into a hug that he doesn’t return so much as slump into, his head on Yunho’s chest and his arms heavy by his side. _“The San will come out,”_ he sings lightly in English, swaying them side to side, _“tomorrow, tomorrow, bet your bottom dollar, that’s tomorrow!”_

“Let me pen that into my calendar,” he mumbles, voice muffled against Yunho’s chest. “Tomorrow I tell Yunho I’m gay, or whatever.”

“Or whatever,” Yunho snorts a laugh. “What’s the ‘whatever’?”

San shrugs against him, still too lazy to lift his arms. “My parents wanting grandkids, probably.”

“Why do they need a grandchild?” Yunho coos, still swaying them side to side, one foot to the other. “They have a perfect baby right here!” San groans incoherently into his chest, but still doesn’t make to extricate himself until Yunho ruffles his hair once more, plants a loud kiss onto the top of his head and then steps away. San immediately misses him. He feels far too exhausted to stand up by himself. “Wanna help me clean up?”

“Extorting a child for free labour?” San arches a brow. “Aren’t there laws against that?”

“Well I can’t properly hire you,” Yunho says. “Then Wooyoung would have enough coworkers to form a union, and it won’t be long until he recruits you to his cause and then, child labour considered, I will have quite the lawsuit on my hands.”

"And why shouldn't Wooyoung be allowed to form a union that will protect his interests?" San challenges, a smile pulling at the corners of his lips in the sunbaked warmth of Yunho’s affection, following him despite his complaints to a corner of the warehouse stacked with brooms, buckets, mops. 

"You've met Wooyoung," Yunho shakes his head, despairing. "He'd be persecuting me for the fun of it."

"Way to sound like every CEO," San snorts a laugh, taking up one of the brooms. "Maybe I will help him unionise. Damn The Man."

Yunho shoots him a glance, gives him a smile. He's always reminded San of rivers, somehow. Connecting people. Leading them home. Bright and glistening gold in the sun, but so refreshing and sweet to fall into his weightless adoration. "You really weren't kidding, huh?" he says, and San tilts his head in question until he clarifies, "About always taking his side."

"You remember that?" San scoffs a laugh, setting his broom to the floor and beginning to sweep. "I was joking." 

“And yet,” Yunho gives a broad, airy sigh, “here you are.”

“I think it’s less a matter of taking his side,” San considers, “and more that he’s a lot more correct a lot more often than a lot of people seem willing to give him credit for.”

Yunho blinks at him, folds his hands on top of the end of his broom and rests his chin on them. “I think that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said about Wooyoung.”

San shoots him a confused frown, asks, “Why?”

“You said it yourself,” he shrugs, pushing up and starting to sweep alongside San. “People don’t like giving him credit where it’s due.”

“Yeah but _why?”_ San repeats, eyes flicking from the small pile of dust he’s sweeping to Wooyoung at the head of his class.

Yunho hums, and takes a long moment to respond. “A couple of things,” he says at last as they’re sweeping around the lounge. “He brags a lot, so people don’t really want to flatter him. And for the rest of it, he’s loud and complains and never seems to take anything seriously, so everyone assumes that everything he does he gets from luck, or natural talent. He’s like you, I guess,” Yunho considers out loud. “He really doesn’t like people seeing how hard he works to accomplish something, and in his field they all just sort of assume that he didn’t work hard enough to earn it. So,” he shrugs again, “people kind of hate him even if they like him, and not many people compliment him at all. Ah!” he clicks his fingers, “You know he was a trainee at Big Hit, right?”

“He _what?”_ San nearly drops his broom, head whipping around to look at Yunho. He might not know the next thing about trainees and idols, but even he knows that name. And he’d never heard this before because he’d never asked Yeosang, and he’d never thought to ask Wooyoung because it seemed… Well, it seemed incongruous and almost absurd at the best of times - a distant past, and the person that Wooyoung was long before San had ever met him. 

“Yeah,” Yunho brushes past as though it isn’t such a big deal as one of the biggest companies in one of the biggest entertainment industries in the country, “and he left and all and I don’t really know why, but it’s not really my business so I don’t bother asking, but then there’s all these people who say the strangest things,” he continues without missing a beat. 

San is beginning to wonder if it’s really such a good idea for Yunho to be gossiping so openly about someone who is in the same room as them, and then wonders if it wouldn’t be worse to be having this conversation behind Wooyoung’s back rather than right in front of his face. 

Morally, ethically, he thinks he should probably stop Yunho from talking and just mind his business. 

A morbid curiosity compels him to say nothing at all.

“Like,” Yunho considers, “things like, _he never would have debuted because he looks too much like Jimin,_ or _he was too casual so they kicked him out_ or _he didn’t like the food rations so he gave up -_ you know, shit like that, that’s just absolutely like… Have they ever met Wooyoung in their life? It’s bad enough that they’re talking about him,” he frowns at his pile of dirt, “and he loves this too much to give up over stupid reasons like that. But anyway,” he says, shrugs it all off, “it’s nice that you talk about him like that. Not many people do.”

“More people should,” is all San can say. 

Wooyoung is… Well. Maybe San doesn’t know him well enough to say, hasn’t seen enough of him to tell, but he’s _passionate._ And maybe he can see where that enthusiasm might be misconstrued as carelessness, where the way he enjoys his work might be taken as not taking it seriously enough to deserve the rewards of his efforts, but that’s absurd, isn’t it? 

He’ll listen to a song for a week straight to study the film techniques that piece the music video together, he’ll dance any chance he is allowed, he’ll teach others what he knows and give advice, give referrals that might put Junyoung in place to get a job, that gave Jongho the platform he needed to have his own efforts be recognised. 

San doesn’t think Wooyoung should be undeserving of recognition simply for the fact he is enjoying what he does. 

He doesn’t think Wooyoung should have to hate his work, and hate his job, and suffer through his successes to be considered talented, or skilled, or hardworking, or driven. 

“Hey, Sannie?” Yunho asks after a long stretch of minutes of them sweeping into the silence of music filling the room for Wooyoung’s class. “Can you do something for me?”

“Sure,” he answers readily, and waits for Yunho to tell him what it is. 

“I mean,” he considers, “I’m not really asking you to do something so much as asking if you would, or if you are, but. Do you think you’d be friends with Woo?”

“I’m already friends with him,” San says like it’s a question.

“I know,” he blows out a sigh, “I know, but. You know, the way me and Mingi are friends, or you and Seonghwa. Do you think you guys would end up…you know.” _Part of each other’s lives._

San swallows, eyes on the floor as he merges his pile of dirt with Yunho’s and takes a knee to brush it all into a dustpan. “I don’t know,” he says at length. “I don’t know how it happens.”

“Neither do I,” Yunho agrees, and when San hazards a glance at him he’s resting his chin on the end of his broom again, watching Wooyoung’s class. “He’s really special though, you know? To me, and to Yeosang and Hongjoong and all that. But I kinda worry sometimes that he doesn’t think so.”

“I want to,” San admits, his voice small. He can’t really look at Wooyoung directly, his heart in his throat, but he sees him. A flicker of motion that lives in the corner of San’s eye, this Wooyoung. He thinks he wouldn’t mind looking at him a bit more, if only he didn’t like him so much. If only he wasn’t scared that if he looks too hard, blinks too much, then he will disappear from San’s sight. 

“I guess that’s enough, then,” Yunho tilts a little to smile at him, his eyes creasing and his lips parting to show his teeth. “And I don’t mean just put up with all his shit, either,” he adds, shaking his head and picking up San’s broom. “If he’s being stupid, make sure you give him a smack.”

There’s no real rush to them cleaning up the studio while Wooyoung teaches his class - Yunho dancing while they wipe down the table, San humming along when the song plays over the sound system, and when it’s Yunho who he knows well and who he’s never needed to impress San doesn’t bother holding back to ask the odd _how do you do that_ with laughter in his voice, clumsily following along less than half a beat behind when he copies the choreo for San to see. 

Before they empty the bins Yunho takes him to the corner store across the road from the studio and buys two large bottles of coke and they sing badly into them as microphones as they walk back - some mournful, pining OST to a show that Seonghwa has been watching lately that the manage to misconstrued as recklessly cheerful. 

By the time Wooyoung’s class is coming to a close and they’re pouring drinks into disposable cups for the students, San has long since been relieved of his misery from the past week. Such is the effect Yunho has on people, and he’s endlessly thankful for it. 

But still… 

Still.

As the night winds down to a close, and the students filter cheerfully out the doors, and Wooyoung hugs San to say goodnight, and the kiss the presses to his cheek lands clumsily closer to his jaw, and Yunho’s bundling the full bin bag into Wooyoung’s hands and ushering him out, telling him they’ll come in early and mop the dance floor before their classes start tomorrow - as Yunho’s shutting off the lights, and San’s waiting by the doors nearly shivering in the lamplit dark and the cold silence in absence of their studio’s music, he can’t help but feel it all creeping back to him.

He can’t help it.

Wooyoung is long since gone, skateboard slung over one arm and his bag hanging from the other, and San leans his cheek heavily against Yunho’s shoulder after pulling the heavy doors closed, letting him chain them together and clip the heavy padlock closed. 

“Hey,” he can’t help but say, because it’s still eating at him despite how much fun he’s had, “what do you do when you…think you can’t?”

He doesn’t ask what San means, hums consideringly and flicks the keys around his finger. “I don’t know,” he says. Lightly. Casually.

Gently, in consideration of San.

“I never really think about that, anymore,” he admits, and sounds apologetic without being guilty. “Instead I think… I’m not so scared of results. I just give my best. And even if I’m not able to give my best,” San feels Yunho shrug against him, feels his arm come up to wrap around his shoulders and steer him towards the street, “instead of feeling bad about it I just try again.”

San hums against Yunho’s shoulder, nods vaguely. He gets it, even if he doesn’t understand.

“I know it’s not very good advice,” Yunho admits, not releasing San from the warmth of his embrace as he lifts his phone to call an uber, “but it was too hard for me to keep working well when I was worrying so much about doing everything right the first time. So instead of giving up, I decided to change my mindset.” 

San feels him twist, feels Yunho plant a kiss onto the top of his head. He can still feel Wooyoung’s lips lingering at the corner of his jaw. 

“It’s probably not what you need to hear,” he says, squeezing San closer against his side. “That’s fine, though. I can cheer you up, but maybe I can’t give you the right advice. You’re doing well though, Sannie,” he says, and San tries valiantly to make himself believe it. “You’re working hard, and asking for help too. You’re doing everything right,” Yunho’s large, gentle hand rubs reassuringly up and down his arm, “so you’ll get it eventually, for sure.”

He doesn’t say anything, but he knows Yunho doesn’t need him to. He takes those words, and wonders if they could ever apply to him. 

To care less about doing well, or to care more about trying at all. 

He’s never been particularly good at either of those things, but that night when he sleeps he dreams of rivers running to the sea and sad songs sung joyfully, and a misplaced kiss lingering at the corner of his jaw. His dreams are full of adoration, and a blooming warmth trying to push its way through the climbing vines that have tangled in his chest to find the sun.


	9. aurora

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> walks in a month late with starbucks, bet u thought ud seen the last of me ahahaaa can u believe it only took three whole chapters for me to finally get back to my plot outline lol thats the shortest tangent ive ever gone on
> 
> cw for another lil panic attack but not as Overwhelming as last time. brief mention of past experiences w depression and a lil bit of sensory overload, but those things r very minor

He wishes the warmth of the weekend might have clung to his skin a little bit longer - just a little. He tries to maintain Yunho’s positivity, and keeps himself industrious and upbeat throughout Monday, and most of Tuesday too. He works with Soyoung on their pas de deux, and is guiltily relieved when they can’t make it far - and not only for his own shortcomings.

She’s struggling too, he forces himself to realise. They all are, bar perhaps Yerim who, beyond her experience in Balanchine Method, has a mind and enthusiasm for the choreography that reminds San of Yunho. 

He clings to her optimism almost desperately as he forces himself to focus, forces himself to pay attention to nothing but, at the very least, memorising his steps. Beneath the shame of his dependence on them, the three of them are keeping him afloat more than he’d like to admit. Yerim with her patience, Minyoung with her frustrations mirroring his, Soyoung with her sweet-voiced charisma and the tendency she’s picked up to bring a tray of iced coffees on the days they will all be working together. 

It’s more often than it should be, the days he’s there to be offered one of those coffees - and it’s not written in their schedule, because he  _ shouldn’t  _ be, but Soyoung seems to know that, and account for it, and every morning there is one for him too. 

“We’re gonna get you back for these,” Yerim tries to promise one day.

Soyoung only chimes out a sweet  _ Ooooo~  _ and sing-songs, “I hope it’s a sexy punishment.”

A laugh startles through him and he puts his hand over his mouth before he can spit his drink everywhere.

Minyoung arches a brow at him. “Did you just have a stroke?”

“No,” he chokes out once he manages to swallow it down, “I just got coffee in my lungs.”

He thinks he might know why he likes Soyoung so much, and why her casual consideration is such a welcome familiarity to him. She's a lot like Wooyoung in certain ways. 

In some ways, yeah. In some ways, the way she is with Yerim and Minyoung is the way Wooyoung is with Yunho and Hongjoong, but in a lot of ways… 

In a lot of ways, though, the way she is with San isn’t the way Wooyoung is. And the way San is with her isn't the way he is with Wooyoung. And he thinks - he briefly entertains the question of whether he would like to be, or has any inclination towards her. And he examines for a moment his mind's ready answer that no, not at all, not even a little bit. And he kind of knows that the only reason isn't that she doesn't have any interest in him beyond their working together. 

He knows like a natural and effortless truth that it isn't even the biggest reason, but with a small smile forced on his lips he doesn't let himself think any further than that despite how his stubborn train of thought desperately wants him to.

It's because she's a playful breeze and glass wind chimes hung from the eaves of a house, he tells himself to think, instead of ocean waves and a string of bells tied around a temple dancer’s wrist. 

They're different, he tells himself to think. That's why. Because they're different, and because he likes Wooyoung more than enough already, and just because they are similar it doesn't mean he has to like them both. 

(He does think, however, about the unsubtle relief that would fill his mother's voice if he were to call and tell them about Soyoung instead. The idea turns his stomach, a little, and he refuses to tell himself why.)

(Somewhere, some part of him rushes to reassure that Junyoung thinks they are dating and have been for a while. He dares that train of thought to tell him why it's such a relief. It falls silent, quelled.)

"San?"

"Hm?" It takes a moment for him to blink, draw himself out of his thoughts, all of them clinging to him like so many dusted cobwebs. 

"Are you coming?" Minyoung prompts.

He glances around at them, wonders if they need to be somewhere and he missed it. None of them seem in a particular hurry to leave. "Where?"

"We're getting dinner tonight, once we finish up," Yerim repeats on their behalf. “Us, and maybe a few others.”

"Oh," he looks somewhere between the three of them, but not really quite at any of them. "I don't really…"

"I know you  _ don't really,"  _ Soyoung rolls her eyes - playfully, a smile sitting in the corners of her lips, "but we're friends, right? You can if you want."

Are they friends? They're friendly, he knows, and they work close together. It wouldn't be strange, he considers, or even difficult for them to leave the studio together. To stop by down the road for dinner, and maybe a drink or two. "Sorry," he's already shaking his head abashedly before the thought can even establish itself properly in his mind, "but I'm-"

He expects a lie to roll easily off his tongue, and nearly chokes on nonexistent words when he finds he hasn't thought of one. He's never had to think about it much before. There's always been an excuse ready for him to take. All his traitorous mind offers is that if it's a conclusion Junyoung came to, then it must be believable enough. "My, partner," he fumbles messily around the word and the way it sits strangely on his tongue, "is…" Wooyoung?

Nothing. For once he's run out of lies.

"Don’t let you get out much?" Soyoung teases, tossing a rice puff up into the air and trying to catch it in her mouth. She misses, and her dramatic pout over the fact is so familiar that a small smile tugs at his lips, a warm curl of adoration for the person she reminds him of settling somewhere in the space between his lungs. 

"Not that," he reassures, and it seems easy somehow to frame Wooyoung like this in his mind, and to find a way to speak as though this is the world he lives in, "but I've been busy, and they haven't seen me much."

"You're always busy," Minyoung snorts a laugh. "It's a wonder she ever sees you. Honestly, I didn't even know you were dating," she admits, lazily lighthearted, and the coil of silent thrill that had warmed in his chest tightens a little, chills a little, and he wants desperately to correct her. 

He shouldn't, probably. 

He sees Yerim shoot her a glance, a small frown furrowing her brow in silent reprimand.

He does anyway, because this is his lie, and his make-believe happiness, and his Wooyoung. 

"He teaches dance, so he gets busy too," San says, no jarring emphasis written anywhere in his voice; only a patient articulation. "I only really see him at home or at work, right now." He sees Minyoung look at him, startled realisation in her eyes and a half-smiled cringe of apology when she mouths  _ sorry. _

Yerim smacks lightly at her knee, mutters, "You're so stupid," under her breath, and a laugh slips past San's lips.

"Maybe next time," he half-promises. 

"Maybe next time you could bring him," Soyoung entertains the idea.

A laugh lifts San’s voice and he lies, "Maybe I will." 

It should be said, though, that they don’t rush to finish up in anticipation of the dinner as their reward. They work on coda past evening and into the night, and Minyoung is the one who definitively puts an end to their practice close to seven with a sharp clap of her hands and the harsh point that if they work into exhaustion they’re only going to undo all their hard work.

“Plus,” she points condemningly at Soyoung, “you have a schedule this weekend, right? I’ll let you choose your own bedtime as soon as I know you’re not overwhelming yourself with two different choreographies.”

San doesn’t think to bat an eye at this. Corps dancers only make so much on commission, and most of them at least have a second contract. He’d been lucky - very lucky - to have risen to soloist so fast.

Perhaps it does hurt, though, just a little, to know that Soyoung has been held back by a harsher workload than San’s and that, once her schedule is through and she can focus fully on  _ Apollo,  _ she will not be so held back as she has been. 

San doesn’t want to hold her back.

He wishes he were half as impressive as her.

His phone rings as they’re packing up, buzzing obnoxiously somewhere deep in his bag, and when he pulls it out expecting to see Seonghwa’s name he’s surprised to find it’s Wooyoung. He ignores the sudden clench-drop of his stomach and forces himself to answer instinctively, before sudden nerves can make him let it ring out.

“Why are you calling me?” is the first thing he says, his voice steady, his heart in his throat, his free hand tugging his Blochs off and tucking them into his bag, setting his sneakers on the step beside him.

_ “Because I missed you,”  _ Wooyoung deadpans from the other end of the line - and it certainly is Wooyoung, San realises to the odd sort of confusion that’s telling him maybe this is a joke.

“Uh-huh,” he states, pressing his shoulder up to his ear so he can pull his socks on. “Do you need something?”

_ “No,”  _ Wooyoung’s voice seems to shrug,  _ “but I’m getting dinner tonight with some people I know, I think near where you work.” _

“Okay,” San says, tugging the laces of his shoes loose and pressing his foot in, pulling them tight and tucking them into the side rather than bothering to tie them up. “Have fun.”

He can almost hear Wooyoung rolling his eyes through the sigh that crackles through the speaker.  _ “I’m asking if you wanna come.” _

“Are you?” San keeps his noncommittal tone, not bothering to hide the smile pulling at his lips.

_ “Alright, dickhead,”  _ he hears Wooyoung huff,  _ “consider yourself uninvited.” _

“Oh no,” he pouts dramatically, pulling a jacket out of his bag and threading his arms through the sleeves, “I really wanted to go.”

_ “As if,”  _ Wooyoung snorts a laugh.

“Okay,” he admits, tugging the zip of his bag closed and slinging the strap over his head so it sits across his chest, “You got me. I really want to go home and sleep. But I-” He cuts himself off, heart in his throat.  _ I’m sad I can’t come see you.  _ Wooyoung’s hum on the other end hangs in his silence, taunts him to say it. 

_ “But what?” _

“I don’t know,” he says, “I lost my train of thought.”

_ “Let me guess,”  _ he can hear Wooyoung’s teasing grin in his voice,  _ “you gotta sleep, but you’re sad you can’t come see me?” _

“Sure,” San mocks, pushing himself up to stand with the others, talking lightly amongst themselves, and making for the door. 

_ “I’ll see you later,”  _ Wooyoung promises - playfully, but sounds so sweetly as though he  _ means it. _

“When?” San finds himself asking.

_ “Whenever you want,”  _ he seems to shrug.  _ “You still owe me dinner.” _

“How could I forget,” San rolls his eyes. “Are you free this weekend?”

_ “I have a shoot booked Saturday,”  _ he readily answers,  _ “but after that I’m all yours.” _

San snorts half a laugh into the phone, lingering behind the others as they all stroll down the hall, and says, “Fine. Dinner Sunday?”

_ “I want dakkochi,”  _ he states.

“That’s not dinner,” San mocks, something warm and exciting and unwelcome unfurling in his chest at the thought of busy night markets, and Wooyoung’s hand in his. “That’s a date.”  _ Choose something different. _

_ “Bring Seonghwa then,”  _ he counters, stubborn.  _ “I’ll ask Yunho.” _

“Now it’s just a double date,” San scoffs. 

_ “With  _ **_Yunho?”_ ** Wooyoung emphasises, disbelief dripping through the phone.

“Why does everyone say that about Yunho?” San huffs. “He’d make a perfectly lovely boyfriend, you know? You can have Hwa, I’ll keep Yunho’s soft hugs and big hands.”

_ “Big hands, huh?”  _ he can hear Wooyoung’s smirk.

“For holding,” he feels the need to explain.

_ “Uh-huh,”  _ Wooyoung definitely doesn’t believe him.  _ “Well you’re taking me to Bamdokkaebi Sunday night and buying me chicken, and I don’t wanna hear a word about what you plan on doing with Yunho’s big hands.” _

“You are my sleep paralysis demon,” San says. “You know that, right?”

_ “Dreaming of me, are you?”  _ Wooyoung’s laugh arches bright and shameless through the phone as they step through the front doors, and San blinks at the person leaning against the nearby wall when they turn to acknowledge the group as though waiting for them.

“Oh,” he says to Wooyoung, raising his hand with a bright, dimpled smile, “Yeosang’s here.”

_ “I know,”  _ Wooyoung says,  _ “I invited him too.” _

“You don’t wanna say hi?” he offers, walking closer.

_ “No, I’ll see him in a sec,”  _ Wooyoung reassures.  _ “Tell them if they want a table they’re gonna have to haul ass, though.” _

“I’ll see you Sunday?” San hesitates to have it set in certainty.

_ “Sunday,”  _ Wooyoung agrees, effortless finality.  _ “Love you Sannie, bye!” _

“Love- Lo-” San furrows his brows, pulls his phone away from his ear to see he’s been hung up on. “Love you too, dipshit,” he mutters at the dim screen before shaking his head, tucking it into the pocket of his loose jacket and stepping forward to drape his arms around Yeosang’s shoulders, slumping all his weight against their slight frame. “Sangie,” he mumbles into Yeosang’s shoulder.

“Don’t be gross,” Yeosang stumbles only a little under his deadweight, poking their fingers rudely against San’s waist to make him flinch and twist away with a startled yelp. “Was that Woo?”

“Yeah,” he says, stepping behind Yeosang so he can ruffle their fairy-soft bleach-fried hair between his hands without threat of being poked. “He says hurry up or you won’t get a table.”

“You’re not coming?” Yeosang catches San’s wrists, pulls his arms down over their shoulders to minimise the damage he can do as they start walking down the path alongside the other three, heading in the same direction as San’s bus stop.

“Mm-mm,” San shakes his head against their hair, feels it tickle his nose. It smells like toning shampoo and rosin dust, and he imagines Yeosang’s hands smell much the same. This intriguing cross section between ancient art and a desperate, performative rebellion. “Why does everyone keep asking me to dinner? I wanna go home and sleep.”

“You always want to go home and sleep,” he feels Yeosang roll their eyes, swaying along with San’s steps. “It’s a wonder anyone invites you out anymore.”

“In case you’ve forgotten, Master First Chair Violin,” San articulates, “going out is expensive.”

Yeosang snorts a laugh, not buying it. “You’d first have to leave the house in order to find yourself broke.”

“I’d be a lot more broke if I didn’t put it all in savings,” San says, slipping away from Yeosang as they approach his bus stop. 

“What are you even saving for?” Yeosang wrinkles their nose, turning to face him. Their eyes are dark and pretty, framed like this by their white-blonde hair, and the reflections of street lamps look like stars in their black depths. Yeosang is so beautiful it’s hard, sometimes, to look directly at them. 

“I dunno,” San shrugs, fixing his bag across his chest. “Maybe I’ll move. Buy a house in Denmark or something.”

“You don’t even speak Danish,” Yeosang snorts a laugh.

“I don’t need to speak anything to get a job as a dancer,” San counters, grinning, his hands deep in the pockets of his jacket. 

He watches as Yeosang’s smile slips into something smaller, more considering and shrewd. Their eyes hold stars a thousand galaxies away, distant and beautiful and cold. “That’s the sort of thing someone does when they don’t have anything to stick around for,” they say, their own hands tucked into the front of their hoodie. Mirroring San, perhaps. “Why do you think Seonghwa came back?” They don’t say it like a question, really. 

He feels off-balance, somewhat. He never really expects Yeosang to bring up Seonghwa, and perhaps stays silent for a moment too long.

“I’m just saying,” Yeosang rolls those dark, shining eyes, and the moment is gone. “Learn to have fun again, San. It doesn’t hurt to be a little bit frivolous, as a treat.”

“And now you’re lecturing me on frivolity,” San narrows his eyes, just a hint on a smile sitting in the corners of his lips. He knows Yeosang will find it there.

“I’m lecturing you on excessive pragmatism,” they correct, smacking their hand lightly against San’s chest. Long-fingered, delicate hands. Calloused hands that smell more like rosin powder than toning shampoo. Yeosang more than anyone, San thinks, knows the dangerous deadweight of excessive pragmatism. “Stop looking for places to run to and start finding reasons to stay, before you end up one manic episode away from a  _ really bad  _ impulse purchase.”

“Like a plane ticket?” San arches a brow.

“Like a  _ house  _ in  _ Denmark,”  _ Yeosang hits him again, this time against his shoulder, shoving him firmly towards the bus shelter. 

“I’ll leave you guys here,” San calls out to the girls rather than answer, giving them a bright smile and waving to them over his head as though he isn’t the slightest bit intimidated by Yeosang’s determination to harass him. “Early start tomorrow,” he feels the need to remind amidst their chorus of  _ goodnights,  _ “so don’t have too much fun.”

“Speaking of early mornings,” Yeosang catches the collar of San’s jacket as he tries to turn away, holding him fast in place. “He knows, you know.”

“Who?” San blinks at him, feigning innocence.

“Don’t act dumb,” Yeosang scowls, their grip not loosening from San’s jacket. “You think he doesn’t ask what time you arrived as soon as he comes in?”

“I didn’t know you and Seonghwa were on speaking terms,” San sniffs, and almost regrets saying it as soon as he does. Almost, but Yeosang doesn’t falter, so not quite. 

“I am where you’re concerned,” they say, releasing San with a light shove. “So don’t be concerning. I don’t want to talk to him.”

An unwelcome irritation curls in the pit of San’s stomach, and he tries to squash it down. “I’m the least of your worries,” he says, and hates that he can’t really control the undercut of bite in his tone. 

“This isn’t a joke, San,” Yeosang retorts, sharp as a cold breeze cutting through him. “You really think you won’t give a shit when you break down at twenty-two?”

“Speaking of jokes, I think it’s pretty funny,” San says, begging himself not to keep talking but unable to find a way to stop, battling the cold of Yeosang’s concern with the heat of his sudden frustration, “that you lock everyone out, but as soon as you think someone else needs your help you’re right there on the front lines.”

Yeosang steps back, their expression closed off. Fingers slipping silently from San’s collar. “This isn’t about me,” they say, the mellow timbre of their voice smoothed over, any emotion indistinguishable. “Two of your friends are worried about you. Isn’t that enough?”

“I’m fine,” he says. Firm.

Defensive.

Yeosang’s lips twitch, unhappily. As though he wants to say something, but doesn’t know how to fit the harsh words onto his soft tongue. For all that he can cut Seonghwa out of his life, he’s always been too kind to know how to be cruel. Really, truly cruel, when it isn’t his brittle self-defence at stake. “What do I need to do?” he says instead, a furrow between his brows that speaks of helplessness and a hurting affection. 

“What do you  _ want  _ me to do?” San counters, his hands clenched like fists in his pockets. Every weary, aching part of him tense and hurt. “I’m already falling behind,” he says, his throat tense around the words that he hates, that he fucking  _ hates  _ having to admit, and he blinks quickly when he feels his eyes sting at having to say it, sets his jaw against the sudden swollen ache beneath his tongue. “Do you really think taking it easy is going to fill that gap?”

“I don’t know,” Yeosang huffs, frustrated, dragging delicate fingers back through bleached hair. It flops back exactly into the same place, stubborn and immovable. “I’m not a dancer, how would I know?” San pretends he doesn’t hear the subtle catch of bitter regret in their voice. “But how hard is it to just ask for help?”

“I’ve  _ been  _ asking for help,” he snaps, his voice rising just so that it won’t break. There are so many words in his chest, in his throat, clambering to find his voice, so many that he can’t distinguish one from another so they all sit there, trapped, this anxious swirl of self-flagellating disappointment and humiliation and whatever else comes with it silenced inside of him because he doesn’t know how to say it, doesn’t know how to speak around it, and it feels like every word he has ever spoken is ash on his tongue. Clumsy and inarticulate and so easy to misunderstand, and if all it ever gets is his friends annoyed at him, frustrated with him, then what’s the point of trying to disentangle the mess of his thoughts so he can articulate them. 

It’s easier, he thinks - a bitter parallel to the sensation of peaceful simplicity of understanding that threads through every fibre of his body in ballet - it’s easier if he doesn’t have to speak. If he just doesn’t speak, at all. 

Yeosang is still looking at him. Helpless. Concern pinching between their brows.

It makes him want to cry.

They don’t have any words for him either, and eventually their eyes slip down, away, aside. “Your bus is coming,” they say, nodding vaguely towards the street. 

San tries to give a hum of acknowledgement, but it catches in his throat. Silent. He turns to meet it, fists clenched in his pockets. Mouth pressed tight and tense so his lips won’t tremble. 

“I love you, Sannie.” Yeosang’s sweet voice is quiet and apologetic behind him.

He dips his head, whether as a nod or to protect himself from the blow those soft words deal him. 

He climbs onto the bus with his eyes on the floor and doesn’t bother looking for a seat. There won’t be one, anyway. And there’s no Wooyoung this time for him to rest his head against and shake and shake until he breaks apart upon. So instead he stands in the aisle, head bowed, carefully detangling his earphones with loose, weak hands that he refuses to let shake, and he listens to the first movement of Moonlight Sonata once, twice - three and a half times as he sways achingly with the momentum of the bus, over and over, his eyes pressed closed, painstakingly counting four triples to a bar and forcing himself to breathe. 

He stands at the door of their apartment, leans against the wall next to the keypad and unlocks his phone, the same song still playing quietly in his earphones, and opens his messages to Yeosang.

**sunshine:** **  
** **Im sorry**

_ Sangie: _ _   
_ _ its okay _

_ Sangie: _ _   
_ _ did u get home alright ?? _

**sunshine:** **  
** **Yeah**

_ Sangie: _ _   
_ _ get some sleep ugly _

_ Sangie: _ _   
_ _ love u _

**sunshine:** **  
** **You too**

He locks his screen, drops his hand down to his side. Head resting against the wall, staring up at the crisp hallway light. White walls, dark grey carpet, and nothing else. Just doors leading to rooms. Leading to houses. Homes. Copy-pasted from the one he shares with Seonghwa and Yunho. 

Suddenly, it doesn’t feel all that special. This life he’d taken so much pride in building. 

His chest aches and he wants to cry. He doesn’t want to go inside. He wants to slide down against the wall, right here in the hallway, and cry until the claustrophobia of it crushes his lungs and his desperate heart into silence the way it has already crushed his throat, his tongue, stolen his words from him as though his voice is worth nothing much at all. He wants the walls of this hallway to close in and in and in until there’s nothing left of him, and it will be like he never existed at all. 

It’s a nice thought, unexisting. It’s much better, he thinks, than thoughts of dying. He doesn’t really remember what those felt like anymore. He stopped thinking about it sometime around seventeen, when he realised that people would actually have to mourn him. 

He doesn’t want to die. He hasn’t for a long, long time. 

He just wishes sometimes, when it gets hard like this even just to breathe, that he could take a short break from the world and everything in it. 

His phone vibrates with a text, and he lifts it to see the screen without bothering to shift his head.

_ MARS: _ _   
_ _ Yeosang said you went home. Feeling   
alright? -SH _

Yeosang said. Yeosang said. He wonders what else Yeosang might have said to Seonghwa. Or to Wooyoung. To Soyoung or Minyoung or Yerim. 

_ How hard is it to ask for help? _

They would know, wouldn’t they. For all their troubles, when has Yeosang ever asked for help?

He gives a thumbs up emoji and slumps himself away from the wall, keys in the code and opens the door. Numb, his body not quite his own, he pours himself a glass of water from the fridge and takes one sip, two. Stares down at the glistening taps of the sink for long enough that he realises he’s forgotten to inhale. 

He surges in a breath, blinks away from the indistinguishable reflections and pulls the earphones from his ears. 

The sudden silence feels too large, too broad, but it’s better than the clutter of sound. He thinks. 

He takes another sip of water, but it tastes wrong somehow so he tips it out, leaves his cup on the sink. 

He should shower, he knows. But he also knows that if he decides that’s what he needs to do then he’ll be standing there motionless at the sink for another twenty minutes trying to figure out how to maneuver himself from the kitchen into the bathroom, and from there to taking off his clothes and fixing the temperature of the water, and opening the door and stepping in, and which soap he needs to use, and whether or not he should wash his hair, and then drying himself down, and should he wear his old pants back to his room or just put the towel around his waist? Or maybe he should go to his room first and get clean pants to wear, and then he should probably brush his teeth while he’s there and he can’t remember if he remembered to buy mouthwash and somehow the thought of his bare feet on the tile floors on his way back to his room seems nauseatingly  _ too much,  _ so he abandons the whole idea and goes straight to bed.

He doesn’t sleep, though. 

Lying there in the dark, clothes too heavy on his body. Socks too tight around his feet. He breathes uncomfortably in the silence, his chest too tight and heavy. Stares at the blank screen of his phone caged in his loose fingers not too far from his face. 

He’s so tired, but he’s far too anxious to sleep. His fingers are shaking, lightly, around his phone. 

He watches them for minutes on end. 

The silence is too heavy. Too empty. Too full. 

Should he find some bar sounds to play quietly from his phone? The ambient chatter of too many people talking, a mess of sound that he doesn’t have to  _ try  _ to listen to, and can just comfortably tune out with the volume turned to something just above a whisper. 

Barely moving, he unlocks his phone with his fingerprint. 

There’s a new text from Seonghwa that he hadn’t noticed come in. 

_ MARS: _ _   
_ _ There’s water in the fridge, and leftovers in the freezer   
if you want it. I won’t be out too long.   
Let me know if you want me to come see you when   
I get back, okay? Call me if you need anything. -SH _

He stares at the message for much too long. He hasn’t eaten since an early lunch, he thinks. It’s already almost ten, and he wonders when the time got away from him. Wonders how long he’s been lying here, or how long he’d been standing motionless in front of the sink, or slumped against the wall out in the hallway. He doesn’t know. 

He’s not hungry. Or thirsty.

He doesn’t want Seonghwa to see him.

He doesn’t want to see anyone at all. He doesn’t want to speak, he doesn’t want to be held. He just wants to hear someone talk. 

He doesn’t want to be alone.

**sunshine:** **  
** **Im good**

**sunshine:** **  
** **thanks**

It takes him far longer than it should just to write those short words without moving from where he’d first fallen into bed, his thumb drawing sluggishly across the keyboard.

A thought comes to him, slowly.

**sunshine:** **  
** **Whats hongjoongs radio station called**

_ MARS: _ _   
_ _ [link] _

_ MARS: _ _   
_ _ You can listen to it here. I’m heading home now, do   
you want me to get you anything on the way? _

**sunshine:** **  
** **Thanks**

He doesn’t tell Seonghwa not to; he doesn’t have the energy to insist. He just hopes Seonghwa will take his silence as answer as he taps the link, watches with no expression as his phone buffers and loads and redirects to a webpage that doesn’t seem to like its mobile interface all that much. 

He scrolls ambivalently up and down, left and right where the text doesn’t crop properly, and eventually finds a media player. It takes an excruciatingly long time for it to load, and when it does San lies there in silence for a long moment before realising his earphones are still plugged in to his phone, lost somewhere in his pillows. 

A weak sigh flutters past his lips and he drops his phone onto the bed, sits up to shed his jacket and his socks onto the floor and pulls back the covers to curl properly underneath them still wearing the rest of his clothes. Head cushioned on a pillow instead of the flat slope of his mattress, he reluctantly finds that he immediately feels better. Or more comfortable, at least. Then, searching for his earphones in the dark, he presses them in and folds an arm over his face, lets his eyes slip closed into the crook of his elbow. 

It’s somewhere halfway through a song - light, delicate, poppy. Something smooth and mellow and sweetly melancholy, and melodic enough for him to ignore the lyrics as nothing more than sounds. His breaths deepen, and he slackens the tension from his shoulders, forces his tongue to soften and his jaw to unclench. Lets himself fall into the song the same way he does with classical music; lets it carry him, and swirl sensations like colours beneath his eyelids. 

He has the volume low, just quiet enough to fill the silence lest it make his skin crawl, itch an uncomfortable sensation in his head and down his spine. It’s nice, he finds, to just listen to music. In a way that he never finds time for, in a life where every song he hears serves a purpose. 

He doesn’t need to pay attention. He can simply let it pass without comment. 

It’s nice.

San doesn’t know how long he listens - to what’s left of that song, and then the next, and maybe a third too. He isn’t paying attention at all, and it’s very nice that he doesn’t need to.

He hears Hongjoong’s voice, though, as the last one comes to a close. It doesn’t startle him out of this peace, really. Somehow he fits perfectly into this ambiance. A warm, ambivalent voice. The kind of voice that lets you sleep in, and then comes back to you as a weight dipping the edge of the bed, fingers brushing hair from your brow, a fond murmur that breakfast is ready. 

“Sorry, I wasn’t here,” he says, his words only making half-sense to San as he listens more closely to his voice than what he’s saying. “I was getting coffee, so I just let the playlist go. What did I miss… C2C, HYUKOH and Lee Jin Ah,” he hums, the vague ambiance of a computer mouse passing muffled through his microphone. 

San turns the volume up one point, and then another. Just enough to let the warmth of Hongjoong’s voice sink over him. 

“Questions…” he mumbles to himself, more clicks from his mouse, a few taps on a keyboard. “Someone’s studying for their math final… Matrices, I don’t know, I can’t answer that sorry,” his laugh breathes across the microphone. “You could check Khan Academy?” he suggests. “I’ll send you a link. Good luck, study hard! Get some sleep soon though, okay?”

A single beat of a silent laugh tugs past San’s lips. Hongjoong, of all people, telling someone to get rest. 

“Someone says… I have a pretty voice,” his quiet laughter fills San’s ears, enamoured and pleased. “Thank you! I like that,” he laughs again, his words muffled as though he’s resting his chin on his hand, fingers curled against his lips. “I’m glad you think so. I’m putting you to sleep?” he seems to ask another commenter. “That’s good, it’s already late. Unless it isn’t good? If you need to go to bed, I’ll let you sleep with this,” he says, more subtle clicks of his computer mouse. “Little Bird, by EDEN. You can message or tag me before you go, though,” he encourages, the gentle strains of the song already starting beneath his voice, “at hongnight-underscore-k-h-j on twitter, so I can tell you goodnight.”

And then his voice recedes, the song turned just a point or two louder, and San lets it wash over him. It’s beautiful, he thinks. It really might have put him to sleep, if he weren’t still so nervous. So tense. Anxiety and fear and exhausted frustration aching through his already-weary body. 

Even with this, he can’t sleep. 

Even listening to this music, even hearing Hongjoong’s warm voice. 

At some point he hears Seonghwa come home, the sound of the front door opening and closing again prickling through his entire body and he goes tense, lies completely still when he hears gentle knuckles against his door. 

“Sannie…?” muffled through the wood and whatever song is playing. “You awake…?” San doesn’t say anything at all, his body locked still, and Seonghwa doesn’t linger long. A quiet, achingly sweet murmur of, “Sleep well,” passed through the closed door into the dark of San’s bedroom, and then the soft sound of his footsteps receding. 

San rolls over, presses his face into the pillow that he crushes to his chest. His eyes prickle with tears and the song ends to Hongjoong’s ambient commentary, and between his distant comfort and Seonghwa’s earnest consideration - hearing them speak, hearing the way they speak. It’s comforting. It’s really, really nice, and all over again San is overcome with the urge to cry.

It stings, a heavy weight bursting against the backs of his eyes, a stinging nettle of shame and self-criticism tangled around his chest, snaring between his ribs to burr against his lungs, and he isn’t a stupid teenager anymore, too young to know not to take everything so seriously. He’s grown up now, he’s mature now, he’s an adult who should be in control of his emotions and the way he treats the people who love him. 

But he doesn’t really feel like a grown up mature adult right then, caught beneath a sudden pang of selfishness and guilt and the immediate and overwhelming desire to be consoled.

He wants to be reassured, to be held and told  _ it’s alright  _ and  _ you worked hard  _ and  _ I see you, I see everything you’ve done, and I’m so, so proud of you. _

He wants it so desperately he aches, and something fragile and weak inside him that he has hidden far away for far too long has been pulled out from behind the steel walls he’s built around himself by Hongjoong’s calm, soft-pitched voice, the mellow feeling of peaceful safety that nudges at him; the insistent lap of ocean waves against the waterlogged pillars of an old sand-dusted pier. 

So he peeks over his pillow, unlocks his phone and finds his dusty, cobwebbed twitter account to try find a way to put that desire into words when he drafts a DM to Hongjoong’s work account.

**Joong, i dont really know what to do. Ive been** **  
** **working really hard but nothing pays off and the** **  
** **more people tell me to take it easy and look** **  
** **after myself the more frustrated it makes me feel.** **  
** **I dont want t oget angry at them because i know** **  
** **they say stuff like this because they care about** **  
** **me, but i dont want to work less. I just want** **  
** **to do well.**

He stares at it after hitting send, reads it over and over. Wonders if those are the words that have been strangled in his throat since he spoke to Yeosang. Wonders if Hongjoong will have an answer for him - anything at all. Advice, or a referral, or a reassurance that everything’s okay. He doesn’t know what would make him feel better.

He doesn’t even know if any of that would make him feel better.

He looks at the timestamp. Somehow it’s crawling up to one in the morning, and this fear - this absolute terror of loneliness and isolation hasn’t left him at all. It’s still there, buried in his lungs. Waiting for him to try to speak again, so that it can choke him, steal his words, or twist them into something that pushes away the people he loves most.

The last song drifts to a close, but Hongjoong doesn’t speak up. San doesn’t mind the radio silence - he doesn’t think anyone does, really, and as the seconds tick by ten, twelve, he wonders if the station turns their silence sensors off after a certain point in the night, or perhaps if Hongjoong himself has taken control of the function. 

In reality it isn’t all that long before he announces his presence with a small hum into the microphone, slightly muffled, and San can almost perfectly picture the way he might be slumped over the desk, his chin resting heavily on the back of his hand, illuminated by the blue light of the computer screens while he absentmindedly murmurs, “Hel-lo… That was Jasmine by DPR LIVE, on Hong Night. It’s pretty early in the morning, huh?” he considers. “One o’clock… There are some people who are working, some people who are studying, some who should be sleeping but can’t. I’m just reading comments, and it looks like there’s someone like that now. I won’t read out the whole message,” he muses, “because it’s not really a question, and I don’t think they’re really asking for advice either. Sometimes,” Hongjoong blows out on a comfortable sigh, a pleasant weariness covering his voice like the weighted warmth of a feather blanket, “we just want to air our grievances. So I’ll just talk for a while, I think, and maybe it’ll be nice just to hear a voice that isn’t our own turbulent thoughts.”

He falls silent, considers, another seconds-long stretch of dead air filled only by the absentminded clicks of a mouse, the subdued murmur of Hongjoong saying, “I think I’ll play this in the back while I speak, so it’s not too boring,” before another song begins, turned low enough for him to talk over. 

The subtle creak of him shifting in his chair, a slight cough of him clearing his throat. Details which shouldn’t make for decent radio, San thinks, but which all seem to tie so pleasantly into the ambient comfort of Hongjoong. 

“Anyway,” he mumbles to himself, “what was I talking about? Hm… mmhm. Right. Well… I guess I’ll just talk, then. I think…you know fallow fields?” he asks of no-one - or perhaps of San, listening silently on the other end of this one-way call. “I think about it sometimes,” Hongjoong continues, a peaceful, tangential sort of ramble to the way he talks. “How every few seasons farmers have to rest their fields, they don’t plant anything on it for a while. If they keep growing the same crop every year, every season, the soil turns infertile and nothing will grow. I think people are like that sometimes,” he says, and San hears his deep, comforting breath, his relaxed hum. 

He finds he loves hearing Hongjoong speak through the muted distance of his earphones. And, throat tight with a desperate adoration, he loves that it doesn’t matter that he can’t say anything back. 

“But - I don’t know agriculture,” he laughs - a quiet, subdued sound, “but I have a lot of free time, so I read a lot of useless things,” he says, the barefaced lie falling from him easily, “and I think I read somewhere that if you rotate crops properly, thoughtfully, then the land stays fertile and there’s no real need to rest the fields. I don’t know,” he muses, “but I think people can be like that too. I think when you fall in a slump, when you feel empty and fallow, it might be a sign that you’ve been doing the same thing for too long. And that doesn’t mean you have to change completely,” he reasons, another little laugh tumbling out of him. “But introducing different influences to your life… to your work, or your friendships. It might help inspire you,” he says. “It might help you grow.”

It's almost the same thing Yunho had said, and San is so full of a quiet, aching sort of love that it hurts - this easing absence of distress and pain is drawn from him by Hongjoong’s abstract company like venom from a wound. It hurts, in a new and different way. In a lovely way, almost. In the same way a strained ankle might hurt and hurt and hurt, might stab pain up through his leg to his hip, to his spine, right to the base of his skull, but then one day it heals and his whole body cries with the relief of it.

“Then again. People aren’t really like plants at all, so maybe this is all just silly talking about nothing,” Hongjoong admits. “I’m a bit sleepy,” he adds, “so I’m going to have some coffee. Whatever I’m saying might not make any sense at all,” he breathes a tired laugh, “I’m sorry. That’s just what I thought of, when I read that comment. If it helps, that’s good. If it doesn’t, that’s fine too. In the end I think it’s just nice to hear someone else talk for a while. That’s what I’m here for,” he continues, an absentminded almost sing-song murmur. “Hongjoong, communicating with you when you’re too tired to sleep. It’s nice. I like it. This is your sleep recommendation show, so it’s fine if you feel tired,” he allows, so casually gentle that it doesn’t pain San at all to hear. 

He’s free of pain, he realises. He doesn’t hurt at all, even if his mind is too blurred with a deep exhaustion and relief to truly decipher everything Hongjoong has said. All that self-cannibalising ache, the burning need to cry from an inarticulate desperation that he’d been too scared to put into words - it’s all been soothed by Hongjoong’s easy murmuring. 

“You can sleep at any time,” he reassures, “but I’ll be sad if you go without saying anything. So leave a comment, or message me at hongnight-underscore-k-h-j, and I’ll send you off with a nice song and sweet dreams.”

It’s easy, now, for San to let his eyes slip closed.

They don’t burn or ache beneath his heavy lids, and he finds a quiet smile sitting on his lips.

“Something for that commenter,” Hongjoong says, the ambience of him moving his mouse across the desk filtering in through the microphone. “I hope you get some rest. Here’s something special,” he adds. “A cover by a friend of mine, that he asked me to produce. He probably won’t mind me sharing it,” he says, a laugh catching on his voice. “Here… it is,” he murmurs absently, more focused it seems on finding the file than keeping the air alive. “A short cover of Nell’s  _ Time Walking on Memories.” _

Before the gentle synth of the single keyboard even picks up, San recognises Wooyoung’s voice. Pitched higher, sweeter when he sings (and despite knowing who he is and where he's been, the things he could have done, it has never occurred to San that Wooyoung can sing, or does sing, or sings so clean and kindly as this, that Hongjoong would play his voice across his late night radio), but still with that light and dew-drop clarity that makes San think only of his blossoming smile, the chime of bells in his laugh. 

There is something about it - something about Wooyoung singing this song, and Hongjoong playing it for San to hear. Something unspoken in the silence between each of their breaths, and there is such a warmth of lightness in him. 

All those ugly seeds, all that stinging nettle and poison ivy that has been coiling around his lungs… It’s all torn up now, all pulled out by the root of the weed, and the fallow field of his empty chest feels full to bursting with something else. Something sweeter, and more beautiful. 

Once again, quite suddenly, he wants to cry. Not aching and lost and hurt, a wounded animal beating itself up. He wants to  _ cry.  _ Beautifully. As lovely as the feeling that consumes him. 

That fragile, aching thing that had been pulled out into the light - that scream that had been lodged in the base of his throat. Hongjoong had seen it, San realises, burrowing into the pillows beside him, a pleasant pain in his chest and a helpless smile on his lips, eyes already welling up with soothed tears. This smallest, weakest part of him - Hongjoong had seen it, maybe even from the start. He’d seen all the pathetic things San keeps locked away, and he’d spoken some articulate, sleep-deprived nonsense into the vast silence of insecurity.

San thinks he sees now more than ever how Seonghwa can love him.

He doesn’t need to speak for Hongjoong to know him, and he doesn't need to ask before Hongjoong will help him, and San as that bleeding heart that he keeps so purposely locked away is so effortlessly reassured by his intentional kindness that it  _ hurts,  _ in all the right and most pleasant ways. 

Thank you, he thinks, and sniffles away the heavy breath of a laugh in the darkness.  _ Thank you,  _ he thinks, and wishes it so fervently that he hopes the feeling in his heart reaches Hongjoong. Eyes blurred by weariness and tears he clears his nose, unlocks his phone. Thank you, he writes into a message and hopes that Hongjoong knows how deeply he means it. 

_ hongnight_khj: _ _   
_ _ sleep well sannie!! _

He does. He changes his alarm, from five o’clock to nine, and messages Minyoung’s group chat that he will be going in later, in time for their class but not before, and smiles at the party of celebratory emojis Soyoung almost immediately sends in answer. 

And then, locking his phone and pulling his earphones away, he curls his arms around a pillow and sniffles into it, a thankful, almost overwhelmed smile wavering on his lips and tears clinging to his eyelashes, and gives his anxious nerves permission to let him sleep.


	10. divertissement

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a long wait for a long(ish) chapter... thank you all for your patience and kind words, ur comments are rly the driving force of this fic!!! aaaa aa <3 <3
> 
> cw: small alcohol intake, brief mention of mingi under some stress (this will be resolved a few chapters from now!!) and jongho feeling a little lonely/isolated (this is also resolved, probably more off-screen though) - the scene where this happens is mostly the others discussing how they can best help their friends. 
> 
> once again yeosang and san fail the bechdel test...aint that just the way

Somehow, without quite knowing why, San finds himself awake at some bleary hour of the night. He doesn't realise at first, until he finds he's staring at the dim smudge of his window in the dark, blinking at it slowly and tiredly. 

He closes his eyes, and tries to fall back asleep. It’s annoying. He remembers distinctly that he doesn’t have anything planned for his first real Saturday in weeks bar where his boredom takes him, and right now he desperately wants the overwhelmingly sweet comfort of deep sleep.

He’s been going easy on himself since his conversation with Yeosang, and Hongjoong’s abstract words of advice. Inspired but directionless throughout the rest of the week; pushing himself less physically, but exhausted in a hundred different ways with the way he’s forced himself to wade through introspection of the piece he’s meant to be performing.

The problem with that, though, is that he can’t just stop thinking the way he stops dancing. He’s been conscious, what, twenty whole seconds? And his thoughts have already drifted to that fucking choreography. Like ice-cold water injected like adrenaline straight into his heart, spreading through his limbs, an absurd anxiety that hisses that he should be using this time to work on it.

_ No,  _ he forcefully tells himself, eyes shut, jaw tense,  _ I should be  _ **_sleeping._ **

There is a discomfort, somewhere in his body. In his room? Somewhere. 

He rolls over, pillow clutched loosely to his chest, and pulls the blanket up over his shoulders. He's staring at the door now, still unable to sleep. That anxiety still prickling under his skin. Maybe he's thirsty. 

Maybe he needs to piss. 

He closes his eyes, breathes a sigh into the silence and tries to will away the vague feeling of something being not quite right. Imagines punching George Balanchine in the face for catharsis.

Silence?

He stills, his breaths quiet. Eyes still closed.

There - another subtle half-sound whispering through the apartment. He scowls, reaches for his phone and squints achingly when the screen lights up, barely manages to read that the time is just past one in the morning before he has to turn it off again. 

Did Yunho stay out late? Is he just getting home…? 

His bleary mind fumbles for a reason before he thinks, well, it is a Friday night. 

The hush of a whisper too quiet for him to distinguish brushes beneath his door and he huffs, suddenly frustrated. If Yunho is drunk and waking San up by bringing someone home then screw him and any code or formality that might tell San to roll over and pretend he hadn’t heard it. He's decided he's thirsty after all. 

Turning his phone away from his face and using the dim light of the screen as a torch he pushes up from his bed, doesn’t bother putting a shirt on before pulling open the door. It’s just Yunho, and whoever he picked up.

Past the short hall, he pauses. 

It is not Yunho, and he very much doubts it’s anyone Yunho is planning to sleep with. 

“Which room is his?” he recognises Hongjoong by the whisper of his voice, and by his soft-edged silhouette, and by the dim glimmer of his jewellery catching the light of San’s phone.

“I don’t know,” Wooyoung hisses back, defensive. “I haven’t been here in ages.”

San blinks at them, bleary and half-asleep, and wonders if he’d really woken up at all or if he’s just having some…bizarre and vivid dream.

“Are you breaking into my house?” he asks without thinking to whisper back at them, his voice rough and quiet and catching on sleep. 

Wooyoung startles so sharply he almost trips over the coffee table, a surprised squeak slipping out of him before he claps his hand to his mouth and Hongjoong violently shushes the both of them, pointing condemningly at Seonghwa’s door with a vicious glare levelled at San with such intensity that he whispers, “Sorry,” before he thinks wait, no, still, what the actual fuck. 

“Why are you  _ naked?”  _ Wooyoung hisses at him, tattooed hands covering his face in the dark. 

He isn’t exactly naked, but he’s a bit too confused to bother correcting Wooyoung on that, instead countering, “Why are you in my  _ apartment?  _ At one in the morning?”

“Which room is Yunho’s?” Hongjoong asks, as though San’s questions don’t hold much worth in being answered.

They hear a door click open, and all three of them whip around to see Yunho step blearily out of his room, his hair a mess and a stretched t-shirt almost hanging off his already stupidly broad shoulders. He blinks at them in silence for a long moment in the dim half-light of San’s phone, and then asks, “Are you breaking into my house?”

Three voices shush him, and three fingers point at the door to Seonghwa’s room like it’s a threat. 

“Sorry,” Yunho whispers, and blinks owlishly at all of them before his eyes settle on San. “Are they breaking into our house?” he repeats his question to San, this time in a whisper.

“I think so?” he responds just as quietly, unsure.

“Yunho,” Hongjoong interrupts, waving at San to shut up, “do you still have my bag?”

Yunho blinks down at him slowly and San can almost hear his sleep-sluggish mind working when he furrows his brows up at the ceiling for a moment before realisation dawns across his face and he points excitedly at Hongjoong for a moment, a gasp rising in his throat before he turns on his heel and races back into his room, leaving the door ajar behind him. 

San opens his mouth, once more with the intention of asking what the fuck is going on, but Hongjoong’s glare silences him before he can so much as make a sound. Jaw snapping shut, he instead catches Wooyoung by the back of the neck, another startled sound squeaking out of him when San tugs him down the hall and into his dark room, releasing him with a push so he can close the door silently behind them. 

“What the fuck is going on?” he hisses, his hand finding Wooyoung’s tense arm in the dark and shaking him a little, as though that would make him speak. 

“Um,” he breathes out, and San isn’t really sure how close they are but he can feel the air of autumn that clings to Wooyoung’s clothes against his bare chest, chill and breathless, and then Wooyoung is rushing out, his words half-lost in his harsh whispers, “I asked Hongjoong to paint something for me, for a shoot location, but the last time we went we got found out and split up and Yunho had Hongjoong’s bag and we all just kinda forgot because it was like a month ago, but because I’m filming tomorrow we need to do it tonight so we came to pick up Hongjoong’s stuff. Sorry,” he tacks nervously onto the end.

“So it’s fine to wake me up for this shit, but not Seonghwa?” he drags a hand down his face, feeling more awake now than he has any right to at one in the morning - and equally as exhausted. And still not understanding half of what Wooyoung just said. 

“If Seonghwa wakes up we won’t be allowed to go,” Wooyoung says and then hesitates, his cool hand finding San’s arm in the darkness, sliding up to his shoulder. Mapping where he is, in relation to Wooyoung. 

He tries desperately not to linger on the lingering feeling Wooyoung traces across his skin, goosebumps erupting in his wake. He shudders a little under the touch, and then pretends he doesn’t. He can’t afford to have Wooyoung’s hands on him in the dark, in his room, so he catches where Wooyoung’s fingertips have found San’s collarbone to rest against and moves him away, his fingers tight around Wooyoung’s wrist. 

His skin  _ burns  _ where Wooyoung’s hand had been. 

“Can you skate?” A shallow thread of voice enters Wooyoung’s whisper, makes it rough and sweet, and San’s head spins. It still feels like a dream.

“No,” he murmurs quietly, like it’s a question. 

“Can you run?” He sounds breathy now, and breathless, and San’s hands tighten against him, just a little. It feels like a dream.

“I guess.” Here, in the dark, able only to see the most vague impression of Wooyoung’s face as though he still isn’t quite awake, San wants suddenly, recklessly, almost violently to kiss him. To push forward and crowd him back and have him fall onto San’s bed, and to follow him and kiss him breathless in the dark, kiss him until his lips are bruised and gasping and his blood is warm enough to shed the chill of the air outside, and he wants to taste the line of Wooyoung’s jaw beneath his tongue and hear what sounds might slip out of him when San is biting on his neck, or down his chest, or-

“Will you snitch?” Wooyoung asks, and San can almost see the glimmer of a nonexistent light in his eyes, because there is no light here for them to reflect and he’s so glad he can’t see the rest of Wooyoung’s face because it means Wooyoung can’t see what’s written all over his. But he can see the excitement in him. Feel it bubbling beneath Wooyoung’s skin, where San is holding him back.

“About what?” he manages to ask. His head is spinning. He swallows against the way he can almost imagine the taste of Wooyoung’s skin against his tongue, feels more than sees him lean closer in - hears more than sees his grin when he speaks. 

“Come with me.”

_ Fuck.  _

Fuck, fuck. He bites back the groan that’s sitting in his throat. Fuck. He feels dizzy. He feels like he’d walk to the ends of the fucking earth if Wooyoung asked him like that. 

“Where?” He’s still holding Wooyoung, his skin warming beneath San’s hands. 

He feels Wooyoung shrug. “Some sketchy alleyway somewhere in Seoul.”

A laugh breathes out of him, and he wants so desperately to kiss Wooyoung. He wants it so much he thinks he might die if he doesn’t. He thinks he might scream if he doesn’t. His blood is trembling in his veins and he feels more awake than he thinks he ever has. He imagines he can feel Wooyoung’s breath in the space between them. “I guess.”

“You might want to get dressed then,” he says, and San can hear the nonchalance forced into his voice. “It’s cold outside.” A moment of pause, and then: “I won’t keep you warm this time.”

San scoffs a laugh and lets Wooyoung go, steps past him and feels his bare shoulder brush against Wooyoung’s jacket. “All I’d have to do is ask,” he says, finding his closet in the dark. 

He hesitates a moment - just a moment, before pulling the flannel pants he’d slept in down his hips and stepping out of them. The quiet slide of the fabric over his skin is so telling in the darkness, and he can feel Wooyoung’s sudden stillness behind him. Prey-like. As though he’s been cornered by San and the adrenaline of it sits high and rushed in his throat. And for the first time he wonders, outside of his own dizzying thoughts, if Wooyoung wants him. 

Here, in the dark and the silence, where they can’t see but they can hear, and they can feel. Where they won’t be betrayed by what expressions slip past their control and it makes them less wary of their thoughts, more bold than they should be. 

He wonders if Wooyoung wants him, knowing that even if he does neither of them will do anything about it. 

That moment is breathless for all that it lasts only a few seconds before San’s searching hands find a pair of pants in the dark, and a soft, loose shirt, and an overlarge leather jacket that might have belonged to Seonghwa. 

“Come on,” he says as he steps past Wooyoung, startles him out of his rabbit-like silence. 

There’s no-one in the house when make it to the door, and when San bends to lace his boots and pick up the beanie he’d left there a week ago he notices Yunho’s shoes are missing too. Wooyoung still hasn’t said a word, and San risks a glance at his profile from the corner of his eye, lit up from the dim light of his phone while he types something out. 

The length of his hair hides his eyes from San, softens his cheek and sharpens his jaw. His ears are dark at the tips, above the swaying glint of his earrings. 

San pulls the beanie over his hair and wonders if Wooyoung is blushing. 

He checks his pockets for his phone, his keys, his wallet, and then catches Wooyoung’s wrist to pull him out the door. Something jumping in his pulse to match the way Wooyoung’s thrums beneath his fingertips.

“Took you long enough,” Hongjoong mutters when they meet him outside, scowling behind his glasses with his arms folded over his chest against the chill in the air. “You two finished making out?”

“Ha, ha,” Wooyoung drily mocks, and San can’t tell if there really is an edge to his voice or if it’s just what he thinks he expects to hear. “If we started, you’d be waiting all night.”

Well, he certainly sounds back to normal.

He can’t get Wooyoung’s sudden silence out of his head. The way his cold fingers had traced up San’s arm.

“You’ll have to be a whole lot more than  _ cute  _ before I kiss you,” is what he says, almost entirely without thinking. 

Hongjoong rolls his eyes and starts walking and Yunho snickers a laugh, falling into step beside San. 

“So you agree,” Wooyoung skips to catch up with them, his shoulder brushing once against San’s and then away. “You think I’m cute.”

San spares him a glance from the corner of his eye, looks him up and down. “You woke me up at one in the morning by breaking into my house. Frankly, it’s the only reason we didn’t need an ambulance.”

Wooyoung points condemningly at him, a scowl furrowing his brow, to demand, “Did you just threaten domestic violence?”

“It’s not domestic violence if it starts with a  _ home invasion,”  _ San emphasises. 

“Yeah,” Yunho agrees, “I’m pretty sure that’s just self defence.”

“Lawyers, back me up,” Wooyoung complains to the empty streets. 

Of course, no-one answers his plea. 

When they arrive - wherever it is they’re going, San isn’t entirely sure even once Wooyoung confirms it’s the place - San finds himself surprised to see Yeosang is waiting for them. 

“Jung Wooyoung,” they uncross their legs, standing up from the upturned milk crate where they’d been sitting so elegantly amidst the cold concrete and dark, “I am going to skin you alive.”

Wooyoung, in all his ingenuity, steps behind San and places him between himself and Yeosang, hands firm on San’s shoulders as though he is a stormwall between the sea and the rain. San and Yeosang look at each other, silent acknowledgement of the realisation that they are very much in similar predicaments and accepting the helplessness with which they’ve ended up here. 

“Sannie,” Wooyoung whines, his voice pitched high and whiney, “save me~!”

“From what,” San snorts, “the big bad Sangie? I bet whatever they do is deserved.”

“You sent me a text,” Yeosang emphasises, “with no context or explanation, just a time and a place, and left me on  _ read.”  _ They advance towards Wooyoung, threatening in all their angelic perfection. “I thought you’d been kidnapped.”

“Why would my kidnappers ask you for ransom?” Wooyoung scoffs a laugh, clearly not nearly as intimidated as he’s making himself out to be. “Broke bitch.”

“Let me kill him,” Yeosang says to San.

“Gladly,” he allows, stepping away from Wooyoung.

“Not just yet, Yeosang,” Hongjoong calls distractedly, spinning on his heel to appraise the walls of the alley. “I’m on commission; I need him.”

“Seriously,” Yeosang mutters, but there is no heat beneath the glare he shoots in Wooyoung’s direction, “why am I here?”

“I thought it would be fun,” Wooyoung says, stepping away from San now that he finds himself under Hongjoong’s protection. “Also, I brought this,” he slings his bag down from his shoulder, tugs it open and lifts two bottles of soju between his tattooed fingers, condensation glistening on the green glass in the white light of a nearby streetlamp. 

“Oooo~” Yunho chimes, setting Hongjoong’s heavy-looking gym bag on the ground and unzipping it, “same brain!” 

Victorious, he pulls out the six-pack of beer San recognises from the top shelf of their fridge. 

“Now it’s a party,” Wooyoung whoops, tapping one of his bottles against Yunho’s. “Joong, you in?”

“Let me get started first,” he waves a distracted hand towards them, quick eyes scanning one of the sparse graffiti-tagged walls, mapping it out. “Give me a hand?” he asks, nodding towards it while he steadily works the rings off his slight fingers, dropping them one by one into the pocket of his coat. 

“Right,” Wooyoung pushes the drinks into San’s hand and skips past to stand behind Hongjoong’s shoulder, “so this is the frame,” he pulls his phone out of his pocket, lines up a shot for Hongjoong to see. “You remember JM?”

Hongjoong tilts his head a little, glancing between Wooyoung’s phone and the wall it’s pointed at. “Jaemin?” he asks distractedly. “You’re still working with Trippin?”

“I haven’t taken any projects lately,” he admits while Yunho exchanges an open beer for one of the soju bottles in San’s hands, “but they choreographed Luri’s debut stage, and he asked me to do a performance shoot for their portfolio.”

“Luri,” Hongjoong repeats, brows furrowing as his eyes pin vaguely over Wooyoung’s shoulder. “Like…  _ dah du-dah blah blah blah,”  _ he mumbles through the notes of a song, gesturing vaguely as though zipping his lips.

“Yeah,” Wooyoung confirms, “it was like- wait, there’s a better way to do this,” he interrupts himself. “Sannie! In my bag there’s a speaker; can you pair it, pretty please?”

“How is it that you manage to make asking nicely sound so repulsive?” San mutters, holding the mouth of his bottle between his teeth so he can free his hands to search Wooyoung’s bag. “For the love of god, just call me a slur,” he mumbles around it.

Wooyoung glances up from his phone, looks San up and down from the corner of his eye. “Which genre?” he asks blandly. 

The heavy speaker in his hand, San pulls the bottle from his mouth to say, “The homophobic kind,” before finding the power and booting it up.

“Noted, Bottom,” Wooyoung turns back to his phone.

San pauses, completely taken aback.  _ “Bottom?”  _ is all he can manage to say, confusion woven through every fibre of his being.

Wooyoung shakes his head, a condescending smile directed at his phone. “Is it really a slur if you don’t hate to hear it?”

“I can’t tell if it’s more important for me to argue that bottom isn’t a slur, or that I’m not a bottom,” he says, pushing up to stand, “so instead I think I’ll just put you in the ground.”

“Ahaha,” Wooyoung fakes a laugh, tucks his hair behind his ear to give San a coy look, “and then what?”

“Every time one of you flirts in front of me I’m adding a twenty percent surcharge to this job,” Hongjoong mutters, tugging Wooyoung’s phone out of his hand to find whatever song he’d wanted to play. “What are you thinking?” he asks Wooyoung, holding the music video up for them both to see. San only really catches flashes of purple, pink, maybe a deep orange from the small screen. 

“You know Marina and the Diamonds, right?” Wooyoung leads. Hongjoong gives him a look, a single brow faintly arched as though daring Wooyoung to  _ doubt  _ that Hongjoong knows where he’s going with this. Wooyoung answers with a grin that spreads devastatingly sharp across his face. “Bubblegum Bitch.”

“Sometimes, Wooyoung,” Hongjoong mirrors his smile, “you have the most incredible ideas.”

“All my ideas are incredible,” Wooyoung scoffs.

“I can name a few exceptions,” Yeosang mutters.

“Seconded,” Yunho raises a hand, passing an open beer on to Yeosang.

“Thirded,” San huffs, pulling up a milk crate and sitting heavily, taking a long drink and holding it in his mouth for a moment, letting the carbonation shock through his mouth and trickle slowly down his throat.

Wooyoung shoots him a scandalised look and demands, “What do  _ you  _ have to complain about?”

San arches a brow and looks pointedly around them, swallowing the rest of his drink. “You broke into my house and dragged me to an alleyway in Seoul at one in the morning, apparently with the intention of getting me drunk, six weeks before my season starts.”

Wooyoung snorts a laugh, tosses his head in a way that flicks his hair out of his eyes and sways his earrings. “You could have said no.”

San remembers the warmth that had licked through his veins in answer to Wooyoung’s hushed invitation, his breathless words, the way he’d almost felt drunk off it. Off hearing Wooyoung’s voice in the dark, enticing him. An implacable siren call, and the near-overwhelming desire to kiss him. 

He really doesn’t think he could have said no. 

“If this puts me over performance weight I’m blaming you,” he warns instead, lifting the beer between his fingers before taking another sip. 

“Oh no, one beer,” Wooyoung rolls his eyes. “How fragile is your metabolism?”

“Shut up,” Hongjoong calls briskly over whatever San might have said in response, turning on the flash of Wooyoung’s phone and setting it up to shed a brighter light on the wall. “Phones out. Who wants to tag?” he proposes, crouching by the heavy bag at Yunho’s feet and flipping it open to bare what must have been more than a few dozen paint-stained spray cans, digging through to pull out red and black, lurid pinks and purples, and a lime green so bright it looks toxic. 

San digs in his pocket for his phone, adds his torch around the vague semi-circle framing the concrete canvas the same as Yeosang and Yunho do, and hesitantly asks, “What’s happening?” when Yunho calls green and Wooyoung dibs on black, Hongjoong tossing them their choices and assigning Yeosang the pink. 

“We’re gonna tag this whole thing,” Hongjoong sketches out with his hand gesturing from where the circle of light highlighting the wall begins and ends. “Loose text, simple images. Whatever you want, just to fill in the space. Once we’ve got that foundation I’ll paint my design over the top.”

“Wait,” San blinks, “wait. You want  _ me  _ to?” He points at his own chest.

Hongjoong arches an expectant brow, holds out the bright purple can towards San, the cap caught between his slight fingers, pinky extended. 

“I can’t draw,” he says dumbly, blinking at Hongjoong.

He snorts a laugh and jerks a thumb over his shoulder towards where the others are arguing over wallspace. “Neither can they,” he rolls his eyes behind his glasses. “Neither can  _ I.  _ No-one gives a shit, San. Just have fun with it.” He flicks his wrist, lightly tosses the can towards San so he has no choice but to catch it, and saunters off to weave between his bickering children, flicking the red can in his small hand to a satisfying  _ click-click-click-click  _ of the ball shaking around inside the can, stirring the paint. 

The first hiss of spray comes and within seconds Yunho has already drawn an enormous lime green dick, right in the middle of their canvas. 

San watches him step back, hands on his hips, to appraise it. “Perfect,” he declares.

Hongjoong has found another milk crate to stand on, raising himself tall enough to paint higher while Wooyoung has taken right over where Yunho had been standing to spray a loosely stylised  _ ONLY BOSS’S DIE YOUNG  _ in black paint right across the middle of the dick.

“That’s not how you spell bosses,” Yeosang states from beside him.

“You think I care?” Wooyoung says as he finishes with a flourish, already moving on. “You think I respect the English language?”

“I’m gonna cover it anyway,” Hongjoong tells them. “Draw as many dicks as your inner unshowered axe-body-sprayed heterosexual fifteen-year-old boy desires,” he drily reassures Yunho. 

“That is  _ so  _ many dicks,” Yeosang cringes.

“What about you, Sannie?” Wooyoung calls over his shoulder, already moving on to tag some other nonsense. “Were you ever a stinky straight fifteen-year-old drawing dicks on desks?” 

“I was practicing ballet at fifteen,” San reminds, shaking his spray can and feeling the steel ball bounce beneath his hand, the half-empty can cool against his skin. “I stank, but I was decidedly  _ not straight.” _

“Do we even know any straight people?” Yunho starts to ask, and is cut off by Yeosang, Wooyoung and Hongjoong all stating, “Jongho,” as though it’s a universal and inalienable fact. “I mean, yeah,” Yunho rolls his eyes, drawing out a cluster of acid green crosses against the wall, “obviously. But do you know for sure? Like, did he tell you?”

“Straight people don’t need to come out, Yunho,” Yeosang patiently articulates, focused on painting a little… cartoon man, with a flower coming out of its head. “They’re  _ straight.” _

And San still…doesn’t really know what he’s meant to be doing, or what is okay for him to do, but he supposes that if Yunho can make the first thing they paint onto the wall be the biggest, most obnoxious cartoon penis San has ever seen, then there can’t really be a way to mess this up. 

So he paints a nice purple triangle, one that warps a little under his unsteady hand. And then another smaller triangle, tucked in behind it. And then he places a purple sun between the hills, nothing more than a semicircle with three lines coming off it. The same way he’d signed his presence on the wall backstage of the theatre the first time he’d performed on that stage - the same wall that had been graffitied and tagged by a thousand different names until there isn’t an inch of bare wood left untouched.

One name among thousands of actors and dancers and performers, lost in the clamour and crowd, but there all the same.

That isn’t so bad, is it?

Well, it’s sloppy, and messy, but now that he’s done it he finds it really doesn’t seem to matter at all. 

“Nice, San-ah,” Hongjoong calls from his precarious perch on the milk crate.

“I don’t know what else to do,” he admits, a smile tugging at his lips half-thrilled and half nerves. 

“Doesn’t matter,” Hongjoong shrugs, already back at whatever he’s working on. “You can do the same thing over and over. Look at Woo,” he reasons, and San glances over to where Wooyoung has in fact written his same ungrammatical phrase of  _ ONLY BOSS’S DIE YOUNG  _ over and over across the wall, each rendition getting a little neater, a little clearer.

“We might change it up later,” Hongjoong admits, “but for now this is fine.”

So San stops worrying about whether there’s a right or wrong way to do this, shakes up the can and finds another clean space on the wall and starts to do the same thing again. A lot clearer this time, and decidedly with more confidence. He lets himself enjoy this, and enjoy the vibrant arguments and conversations of his friends, and the bubblegum grunge pop playing from Wooyoung’s speaker, and the way the world doesn’t seem to exist outside of their circle of light and noise - the city sleeping at last, and completely unaware of the life they’re bringing to this drab, hidden corner. 

There’s paint coating the tip of his finger, dried and crusted and painted over and dried again, and his cheeks hurt from smiling, and he doesn’t want this night to end. He doesn’t believe this night will ever end.

“I thought Mingi was gonna be here,” Yeosang admits, taking a sip of soju from the bottle while they step back to let Hongjoong paint his outline over the mess of their tags. “Doesn’t he usually come to these things?”

“Mingi’s been tired lately,” Hongjoong ambivalently hums, eyes on the wall, focused entirely on keeping his outline crisp.

“Mingi’s been  _ stressed  _ lately,” Yunho corrects, and from the slight glance San catches Hongjoong pass from the corner of his eye he knows this isn’t really  _ news  _ to him, so much as that he hadn’t seemed to want to talk about what exactly Mingi's state of being is with a group of people who aren’t Mingi.

Even if those people are, for the most part, Mingi’s friends. Because San also notes that he hasn’t said a word to San about his dancing, or whether he’s been doing alright since their talk earlier in the week, and San is realising more and more that Hongjoong is someone who will take the secrets and stresses of others and climb the highest ladder to place them in the furthest box on the tallest shelf, and he will  _ keep  _ them, those secrets, because he trusts that everything that is said to him is said with trust that he won’t recklessly tell others, regardless of if he doesn’t know how to help. Because they’re not his secrets to tell.

“What happened?” Wooyoung asks, a counterpoint to Hongjoong’s silence. Not only because he simply likes  _ knowing,  _ San knows, but because if he knows then maybe he can help, and because Mingi is his friend and so he wants more than anything to be able to help.

San is filled with a quiet, half-sweet admiration for them, these friends of his. For Hongjoong who keeps secrets, and Wooyoung who always finds a way to unearth them. 

“Just stuff,” Yunho shrugs. “Life stuff.” And for Yunho too, who knows all these things about all these people, and passes them along with clarity and without exaggeration, if only for the sake of having everyone understand each other. “He just kinda feels like everyone else has a purpose or a goal or whatever, and he still doesn’t know what he wants to do.”

“Is he still studying?” Yeosang asks, and Yunho regretfully shrugs, twists the bottle between his fingers against the ground.

“He deferred this semester,” he relays. “He doesn’t know if he wants to go back.”

San feels an odd regret form strange and hollow in his chest. He doesn’t know Mingi well - doesn’t know him well enough to know what he’s doing, or what he’s thinking or feeling day to day - but despite his initial cautious reservation, San  _ likes  _ him. He likes the sandy grit of Mingi’s voice, and the effortless charisma with which he carries himself, and the way his sharp, almost startlingly beautiful face creases into a smile with his low, brash laughter. 

It feels wrong - incongruent, almost, to think of him as anything but that casual air of good humour that has always seemed to roll off him whenever San had seen him. 

“Does he know what he wants to do?” Wooyoung asks, a furrow pinched between his brows.

“Music,” Yunho readily admits. “He really wants to do something professionally. But he doesn’t know how to make it, like,” he gestures vaguely, “a  _ career,  _ you know? Like, something real. And he doesn’t want to give up his study for something so unsure.”

“Yunho,” Hongjoong calls before Wooyoung can pry any more questions, “give me a hand?”

And Yunho readily hops up, skips over to Hongjoong and crouches down so he can climb up on his shoulders, hands steadying on Hongjoong’s legs when he stands up to give him an extra boost of height that the milk crates can’t afforded, and San thinks it might be less that Hongjoong needed the help and more that he doesn’t particularly want them to keep discussing Mingi while he’s not there, and the conflict of guilt and affection swirls loose and discomforted in San’s chest.

“Wooyoung-ah,” Hongjoong commands once more, his gaze unwavering from the wall he’s painting with one hand folded into Yunho’s hair for balance and the other sketching the silhouette in bright pink and then black above him. “It’s two in the morning. Leave him alone.”

Wooyoung clicks his tongue, almost pettily drops his phone back where he’d picked it up from the circle of torches and bites out, “Why should I?”

“I’ll sort it out with him,” Hongjoong says, patiently but firmly, with no room in his unwavering tone for Wooyoung’s arguments. “He doesn’t want lots of attention right now.”

“That’s bullshit,” Wooyoung snaps, tattooed hands planted on his hips. “I can help-”

“I know you can,” Hongjoong speaks over him, his voice barely rising but still cutting through firm and clean, punctuated by the hiss of the spray paint, “and I’ll ask you when we need your help. But for now we’re discussing his options, and that’s that. He wants time to think things through, and he doesn’t want his friends overwhelming him with solutions when he hasn’t figured out exactly what the problem is. So keep quiet and give him time.”

San sees Wooyoung’s lips push a little, watches his shoulders hunch a little. Chided, and regretful, but still aching with a determination to  _ do something.  _ “You’ll tell me, right?” he threatens.

Hongjoong’s attention doesn’t waver from where he’s painting. “If he decides it’s something he needs your help with, we’ll ask you for it.”

Wooyoung stands for a moment, hands clenched at his sides, before he mutters, “Fine,” all but soundlessly under his breath.

“I’ll tell you what you can do,” Hongjoong says, and Wooyoung visibly and immediately lights up. “You can take Jongho out for lunch next week. And Yunho too, if you’re free.”

“How come?” Wooyoung kicks Yunho’s abandoned milk crate over towards San and Yeosang, hard plastic scraping against the concrete, before sitting on it with one leg folded neatly over his knee. 

“He hasn’t messaged since Wednesday,” Hongjoong admits, patient and calm. “I think he’s getting lonely.”

Quietly, to Wooyoung, San murmurs, “Wouldn’t he be messaging more, then?”

Wooyoung shakes his head, tilted back for a sip of his drink, and says, “No, Jongho isolates when he’s sad. You busy, Joong?” he asks, a little louder.

“It’s not that,” he says, exchanging the paint can in his hand for the one Yunho offers up to him. “I think he just needs to have fun. You two cheer him up best,” he reasons. "I'll see him on the weekend."

The tension over Mingi’s situation slips away easily after that, their conversations easing back into lighthearted banter and dry remarks, Yunho complaining that Hongjoong’s going to break his back if he keeps wiggling around so much and Wooyoung subtly testing the breadth of Yeosang’s patience in seeing how many times he can get away with poking their waist over the course of perhaps half an hour - before they react fast enough to catch Wooyoung’s finger and twist it backwards, threatening to break it until he begs for mercy with many high-pitched yelps and whining pleas. 

He does it again, once more, not long after. Just because he can, and just because he has San to duck around and hide behind when Yeosang rounds on him.

“Sannie,” Yeosang threatens, their voice pitched dangerously low. 

“Wooyoungie,” San forwards the message, glancing over his shoulder at Wooyoung - who peers up at San with a calculated sort of pathetic innocence on his face that San knows immediately is endeared towards what Wooyoung knows of San’s softer nature. He thinks he might be tired of letting Wooyoung get away with it, though, and the moment he decides he wants to see how far he can push Wooyoung (much like but at the same time  _ very  _ unlike the way Wooyoung has been pushing Yeosang) he knows Wooyoung sees something in San’s expression that tells him he won’t be getting off easy.

He ducks away the same moment San’s hand snaps out to stop him, and San hadn’t quite taken the time to decide where exactly he was going to be grabbing Wooyoung, but in his sudden and desperate bid to escape San’s hand locks instinctively at the back of his head, catches in his hair and keeps him firmly in place.

The sound that wrenches out of him is less like the performative, dramatically loud yelps that San has come to expect from him and much… lower. Quieter, as though it had been choked out of him.

His hand is at San’s wrist - gripping, but not pulling him away - and he’s twisted a little under the fist in his hair to lessen the tug. 

“Are you done being a brat?” San asks, voice plain, his expression unshifting before Wooyoung’s wide eyes.

He blinks at San, lips pressed tight, and says, “It’s fun.” Something about his expression though, and the way he says it, encourages San to tug on his hair again, just a little. Just enough to drag another near-silent sound out of his throat.

“Are you having fun now?” he arches a brow.

“Yes,” is Wooyoung’s bold reply.

San scowls, guides him firmly with that hand still fisted in the back of Wooyoung’s hair to the seat away from Yeosang. “Sit down,” he commands, voice firm, and tugs Wooyoung to follow it. “Hands to yourself.”

He concedes, reluctantly but with no real fight bar the petulant furrow of his brows, the pout of his lips. Hands tense and obedient in his lap when San releases his fist from Wooyoung’s hair.

“Well,” Yeosang mutters, dry, from San’s other side, “that’s one way to shut you up.”

Wooyoung glares at them but, with a short glance from San, seems to think better of whatever witty little comment he’d been about to make and simply turns his cheek with a bitter huff.

It’s different, though, from the way he’d been the last time he’d turned away from San.

It’s decidedly different, because his shoulders still incline towards San, and San watches from his periphery as Wooyoung steals glances at his face over and again, as though stubbornly waiting for San to turn around and apologise.

He doesn’t, though. He turns towards Yeosang and picks up the abandoned thread of a conversation about where Yeosang’s been dusting off their vocals, taking lessons in operatic baritone. Not so much with the intention of becoming a vocalist, so much as to open themself to the option of substituting in the symphony’s choir if they choose. 

San doesn’t know much about opera, or about singing, or about vocal training at all, but he eagerly and patiently encourages Yeosang to talk him through it, to run them both through scales before determining San to be something of an alto, or a tenor. And at some point he feels Wooyoung’s resolution to petulance crumble in the face of his pouting going ignored like an ocean’s impatient waves eating at a chalk-and-limestone cliff; feels him turn and angle himself towards their conversation as though waiting for a chance to be included and then, miraculously, dropping his cheek against San’s shoulder with the reluctant huff of a sigh.

It’s only then that San turns to him, his smile gentling and his hand coming up to softly card through the back of Wooyoung’s hair. “Sleepy?” he asks, and Wooyoung shakes his head without lifting it from San’s shoulder.

“Bored,” he mutters, loose lips pushed into a pout. “You should sing more.”

"Why's that," he half-laughs, "so Hongjoong can recruit me?"  _ Ballet is pantomime and silence. Ballet dancers don't sing. _

"No," Wooyoung scoffs, " 'cause it's fun."

San looks down at him, a small smile sitting on his lips. He doesn’t quite know when he stopped, really. Sometime when he was studying in Seoul, maybe, after being caught one too many times humming along to the compositions as he danced. 

He'd sung so much when he was younger, back before it had mattered whether it sounded good or not. Back before music had become too important to play around with.

“Maybe I will,” he says, drawing his fingers under Wooyoung’s hair and letting his hand rest comfortably at the nape of his neck, his thumb tapping a particular, absentminded rhythm against Wooyoung’s skin.

He doesn’t seem to have much else to say, but when San returns his conversation to Yeosang he keeps that hand on the back of Wooyoung’s neck; a reassurance and affection, a thread of attentiveness that won’t stray, and when Wooyoung shifts a little against him as a subtle indication that his interest in sitting still has finally worn out, San turns towards him with an expectantly tilt of his head before he even needs to say a word.

“I want to take pictures,” Wooyoung says to San’s silent question and he nods, loosens his hand from the back of Wooyoung’s neck and brushes the flat of his palm down his spine to sit somewhere just above the small of his back. 

“What of?” he asks, intrigued, and glances over to where Wooyoung gestures at Hongjoong and Yunho talking loudly and animatedly in the ring of light from their phones; Hongjoong standing precariously on the skateboard that had been strapped to the back of Wooyoung’s bag with a dainty hand balanced on Yunho’s shoulder, the other detailing the lurid pink of pop-art bubblegum. 

“Go on, then,” he says, and he knows Wooyoung wasn’t really waiting for his permission - not  _ really,  _ because even if for any reason San had thought it would somehow be right to refuse him Wooyoung would have gone anyway. But the fact he only stands up then, with a bounce in his step, to rummage through his bag for an SLR and stand with his head bowed over the display to fix the settings for low light and a small smile sitting on his lips… 

Something about it still curls a not-unpleasant warmth in the pit of San’s stomach.

Something he doesn’t think he wants to examine too deeply right now, right here, with Wooyoung and their friends all around him.

“Now  _ that’s  _ interesting,” Yeosang says, and San blinks, pulls his eyes away from Wooyoung to tilt his head in question at Yeosang. “I’ve been friends with you, how many years?” they ask.

San thinks about it for a moment before answering obtusely, “Three. Four?”

“Yeah,” Yeosang snorts a quiet laugh. “Four years, and I’ve barely seen you take an interest in anyone that wasn’t Seonghwa.”

“I’m not interested in Seonghwa,” San states, his brows furrowing.

“I know,” Yeosang almost rolls their eyes. “That’s not what I’m saying.”

San frowns, averts his eyes. “It’s not like I haven’t gotten laid in  _ four years,”  _ he articulates.

“That’s not what I’m saying either,” they comment. 

He knows as well as Yeosang does what they’re saying. 

“It’s nothing,” he shrugs, not quite looking at them. “Nothing serious.”

“It doesn’t have to be,” they do actually roll their eyes this time. “I’m just saying. It’s interesting.”

If it were anyone else San might laugh and say it’s none of their business, but it’s Yeosang, and it kind of is. “What about you, then?” he says instead, crossing his legs and leaning his elbows on his knee, tipping his bottle back for the last of his drink. Yeosang gives an almost noncommittal hum of question and San reasons, “You had dinner with him the other night, right? How was it.”

“Fine,” they state, eyes on where they’re plucking the nail of their index finger against the lip of their near-empty bottle. “It wasn’t  _ with him,”  _ they kind of grimace around the words. “He just happened to be there.”

“And?” San prods, curious eyes on them now.

“And nothing,” they articulate. “We said, like, two words to each other all night and it was ‘cause he asked if you were coming.”

San looks at them, shrewd. “Really.”

They raise their eyes, a bothered scoff slipping past their lips, and huff, “It wasn’t  _ bad.  _ It was just,” they’re picking at the label of their bottle now, “weird. Like nothing ever happened, and he’s still like. The same person who was one of my  _ favourite  _ people, only now there’s all this distance between us and it’s  _ weird  _ because I still know him better than almost anyone but I can’t talk to him, and it really felt like that was my fault, and…” 

They wave a hand, thinly veiled frustration simmering in the gesture, and trail off into silence. 

_ And I miss him. _

San knows what Yeosang chose not to say, and doesn’t think it’s really quite his place to say it for them; to push their nose in it while they’re clearly still so vexed. 

He thinks of Seonghwa’s shuddering silence, and the way his throat had choked and closed over the effort of much he missed Yeosang. He doesn’t think it’s quite right for him to say that, either. 

“Does it really matter what happened?” San asks, turning his empty bottle in his hands. “He can still be your favourite person again, right?”

“I don’t know,” Yeosang sighs. “Maybe not. Maybe. I don’t know.”

A lot has happened, San thinks. A lot of harsh words, and a lot of cold silence, and a lot of time wasted on regret and inaction. 

He wants to ask Yeosang about Hongjoong, but he doesn’t know how. 

“You know I have to ask,” Yeosang breaks their fragile silence, eyes locked on where Wooyoung is crouched and peering through the viewfinder to snap candids of Hongjoong and Yunho, “and I don’t really need an answer right now or anything. But he is my best friend. I make threats, you state your intentions, all that shit,” he waves a delicate hand and catches San with a glance from the corner of his eye. “Fuck around and find out.”

“I don’t know,” San mutters beneath the upbeat of the music, swinging the heel of his crossed leg against his other shin in a light tap, over and over and over. Thumb and forefinger squeezed tight around the neck of the bottle; tight enough to almost hurt. 

Yeosang watches him for a long moment, and then says, “He’s not that fragile, you know. You don’t need to be so wary of him.”

“It’s not that,” San says, leaning heavily on his elbows planted on his knee, head angled back to look up at the blank silence of a night sky in a city too bright for stars to show. He doesn’t know what it is, exactly. Or, he doesn’t have the words to explain the vague and subtle turbulence of something that is more undefined feeling than words other than that there is a caution and reluctance in his attraction to Wooyoung. 

Something that says  _ this isn’t about getting laid  _ and  _ I like him too much to want that  _ and  _ I can’t tell, just yet, if I want to be with him or just want to be near him. _

It’s too vulnerable a thought for him to take out and examine in the circled light of this alley amongst his friends. 

It’s too tentative and nervous for him to want to think about, even if it were just him and his thoughts.

**Author's Note:**

> i actually wasn't intending on posting until i'd completed the whole fic, but was feeling a bit uninspired and disheartened after like 2 years of writers block lol so if u could leave a kudos or comment that would literally mean the world to me!!!!!! thank u uwu


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